The new agreement is part of an expansion of Inktomi's relationship to C&W, which began with Exodus, and delivers hosting services for Inktomi Web Search within three data centers in London, San Jose, California, and Reston, Virginia, allowing Inktomi to access strategic elements of Cable & Wireless' global network.

More than 300 million Web searches are conducted on a daily basis worldwide. Cable & Wireless' network reliability ia central to ensuring that Inktomi continues to meet the demand for global access to Internet content. Inktomi delivers hosted search services on an OEM, private-label basis to a leading Web portals worldwide.

With Inktomi Web Search, portals can deliver accurate Internet search results by leveraging Inktomi's search technology expertise and the necessary infrastructure needed to handle heavy query volume.

"Our goal is to provide our customers with fast, reliable access to the most sophisticated Web search technology available," said Vishal Makhijani, general manager of Inktomi Web Search. "By leveraging the Web hosting services and global network that Cable & Wireless offers, we can continue to consistently provide our customers with the highest quality Web search without adding to our costs."

Cable & Wireless is currently upgrading its global IP network to OC-192 using MPLS, which gives Cable & Wireless' customers access to greater network performance for bandwidth-intensive applications including broadband digital content distribution. The high-speed connections support the network performance and Quality of Service requirements of large-scale network infrastructure providers such as Inktomi.