Goldman Sachs Conference: Inktomi Stays Strong Despite Selloff

Despite a wide-scale selloff in Net stocks, Inktomi (INKT) has been trading higher much of the day. The company received some backing from an influential fund manager at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium.

At today's luncheon, Roger McNamee, a partner with Integral Partners, said he sees Inktomi becoming "a platform company" like Intel (INTC), Cisco (CSCO) or Dell (DELL) by next year. McNamee said he likes Inktomi because it has "a recurring revenue stream, a la Microsoft (MSFT), and they're the one Internet company that has that."

Inktomi also will reportedly be discussing a combination search-and-shopping center when it makes its presentation at the symposium Wednesday. Inktomi was up 5 1/16 at 58 9/16 in recent trading.

McNamee said he also likes Flextronics (FLEX) because of "strong management" and thinks Rambus (RMBS) is "a good bet because they're on Intel's side."

McNamee said he is not fond of big enterprise resource planning (ERP) companies and specifically noted that he does not think Lucent (LU) is growing fast enough to justify it trading at five times its growth rate. Its annual growth rate is only in the single digits.

Searching for a Remedy

Remedy (RMDY) was one of the presenters at Tuesday's Goldman Sachs conference. Though officials said they were optimistic about the business outlook and about maintaining a leadership position in operations management systems, CEO Larry Garlick said it was too early to tell what its new product ramp and sales cycle would be, particularly because the company is expecting to launch a lot of new products in the first half of the year.

Some fund managers at the symposium expressed concerns about the company's day sales outstanding (DSO), even though CFO Ron Fior said that DSOs were at 76, which was in line with the prior year and within the 70-to-80 range they had expected.

The company also recently released the newest version of its flagship product, Actions Request Systems 4.0, which offers 32-bit architecture. But some fund managers said they had heard that the upgrade from 16-bit to 32-bit was difficult and were hesitant about endorsing it yet.

-- Medora Lee

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