Verity to acquire viewing and filtering technology from FTP Software; KEYview's award winning viewing technology to replace Inso's QuickView in Verity's SEARCH'97 platform

Business Wire, May 28, 1997

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 28, 1997--Verity, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRTY), a leading provider of search and retrieval technology for the Internet/Intranet today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the KEYview product line of FTP Software, Inc.

KEYview develops and markets quality viewing and filtering technology and is based in Calgary, Canada.

KEYview and KEYview Pro are leading utilities that allow Windows users to view, convert, compress and secure most file types whether encountered on the Internet, corporate Intranets, received as e-mail attachments or found on a hard drive or network. KEYview can be used as a stand-alone application, integrated with your e-mail or groupware application or act as a plug-in to your web browsers. Verity announced that it intends to replace Inso's QuickView technology in its SEARCH'97 product line and will offer KEYview products as a more complete viewing solution for OEMs and end users.

"The decision to replace Inso products with KEYview reflects the importance that Verity places on text viewing and filtering for its SEARCH'97 platform," said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of Verity.

"The opportunity to secure access to those fundamental components of our products is key to this decision. With this acquisition, we look forward to providing OEMs and users with an extremely high-performance, reasonably-priced and superior alternative to meet their viewing and filtering needs. The KEYview technology provides extensible APIs, high fidelity viewing, and an architecture for threadsafe applications that is crucial for applications involving search and information management."

Under the terms of the planned acquisition, Verity will pay approximately $1.5 million in cash. It will be accounted for as a purchase with a significant portion to be accounted for as the acquisition of in-process research and development, which will be expensed in the Company's quarter in which the acquisition is completed. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the coming weeks, subject to customary closing conditions.

KEYview will operate under the "Verity, Inc." name as a separate business unit. The business unit will continue to develop and market the KEYview product line and be based in Calgary, Canada. Robert Miller, general manager, and Richard Motyka, product architect, of KEYview will report to Hugh Njemanze, vice president of Verity's Desktop Product Group.

"Verity is an ideal partner for us," said Rob Miller, general manager of the KEYview business unit. "KEYview's state-of-the-art utilities, which support all major formats and the latest formats such as MS Office 97, give users a competitive edge in today's marketplace."

"As search becomes a more important fundamental technology, a seamless integration with viewer and filtering products is more and more critical," said Philippe Courtot. "We plan to aggressively market KEYview's multiplatform filtering and viewing to OEMs and to end users. We will also make the technology available to other search and software application vendors seeking the same solutions. We welcome the expertise and talent of the KEYview Business Unit to the Verity Team," he added.

"Acquiring KEYview is very strategic for Verity," said Hugh Njemanze, vice president of Verity's Desktop Group. "Multiplatform filtering is a critical, core part of our technology offering and is required to bridge the islands of information across the enterprise. Integrating KEYview's filters and viewers adds considerable value to our OEM partners and for the search applications that leverage the SEARCH'97 platform."

The KEYview multiplatform filtering technology will be integrated with Verity's universal filter technology (new in SEARCH'97 Developer Toolkit version 2.2), allowing hundreds of document formats to be indexed and searched within a single Verity collection. Verity plans to integrate the KEYview viewing technology with Verity's ViewManager component, allowing WYSIWYG viewing, hit highlighting, and highlight navigation of KEYview's 200-plus document formats, along with HTML and PDF seamlessly supported as a plug-in to both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, along with Verity's dedicated retrieval client applications.

Verity also plans to enhance the KEYview product to provide direct support for highlights, navigation, and clustered results list viewing while Netscape or MSIE browsers are used to query any SEARCH'97 server.

Updates to Verity's SEARCH'97 product line including the KEYview integration are currently scheduled for shipment in calendar Q3'97. Verity also plans to integrate the KEYview filtering technology across the entire Verity product line by the end of Q3'97.

About Verity

Verity Inc. was founded in April 1988 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. Verity develops and markets software tools and applications for searching, retrieving and filtering information across the Internet, enterprise and CD-ROMs. Verity's products have been licensed to corporations, government agencies, on-line service providers, Internet publishers and developers worldwide. Verity partners include Adobe Systems, AT&T, C/Net, Cisco, Compaq, Dow Jones, Financial Times, Individual Inc., Informix, NEC, Lotus Development Corp., Netscape Communications, PC DOCS, SAP, SCO, Siemens Nixdorf, Sybase, Tandem and Times-Mirror Pathfinder.