Verity Announces Support for Oracle Portal Partner Initiative; Verity Products Enable Companies to Deploy Portals Based on Market-Leading Knowledge Retrieval Technology

Business Wire, May 15, 2000

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 15, 2000

Verity, Inc. (Nasdaq:VRTY), a leading provider of enterprise and Internet knowledge retrieval solutions, today announced it has joined the Oracle(R) (Nasdaq:ORCL) Enterprise Portal(R) Partner Initiative as part of a growing community that will deliver solutions and services based on the open Oracle Enterprise Portal framework.

As a program partner, Verity will be creating portlets that will deliver Verity Search and Verity Intelligent Classification, two of the most comprehensive and robust knowledge retrieval capabilities on the market today which can easily integrate into enterprise portals developed with the Oracle Enterprise Portal framework.

"By building portlets and working with the Oracle Enterprise framework, Verity's unsurpassed knowledge retrieval solutions will enable respective and future customers to deploy industrial-strength portals that are comprehensive, integrated and easy to navigate," said Michael D. Mooney, Verity vice president of business development. "Enterprise-wide search and categorization capabilities are an integral part of a complete portal offering."

"Verity has been providing key portal infrastructure products for several years now," added Verity chairman and CEO Gary J. Sbona. "As a leader in knowledge retrieval technology, we're pleased to be teaming up with Oracle to provide extensible portal capabilities and functionality to customers worldwide."

The Oracle Portal Partner Initiative is dedicated to establishing a community of leading system integrators (SIs), independent software vendors (ISVs), and content aggregators (CAs) who build, deliver, and support solutions built around Oracle's Enterprise Portal framework. As a member of the Oracle Enterprise Portal Partner Initiative, Verity will have the opportunity to collaborate with other participants in the program and will have access to sample portlets and code from other vendors, as well as the latest versions of Oracle's Enterprise Portal framework.

According to Jeremy Burton, Oracle vice president, Internet Platform Marketing, "The Internet has spawned a new era of instantaneous and widespread information access. Now, the challenge is to manage this information from a single point-of-access. By delivering Verity's proven knowledge retrieval technology as portlets and integrating them with the Oracle Enterprise Portal framework, customers can automatically organize this information into intelligent categories for the delivery of the right information to the right people anytime, anywhere."

About Verity Search

Verity Search is one of the most comprehensive and robust information retrieval solutions on the market. Verity's best-of-breed search technology extends the reach of enterprise information assets and seamlessly ties into the Oracle Enterprise Portal framework, allowing information to be drawn from systems across the company through a single Web-based interface. Additionally, Verity offers an integrated security model that uses the underlying security infrastructure of the operating system on which a corporation is running its mission-critical applications. And, Verity's unique query language and operators offer the level of retrieval precision necessary for today's eBusinesses.

About Verity Intelligent Classification

Verity Intelligent Classification automatically organizes and classifies corporate information into categories based on the standard terms used by companies to describe their business operations. Verity Intelligent Classification enables organizations to build master directories that provide users with an intuitive, visual means to navigate and browse as well as search for information. Unlike solutions that rely solely on manual categorization or mindless category assignments, Verity intelligently and automatically categorizes information according to defined business rules, providing easy and flexible organization of a company's most critical intellectual assets.

About Verity

Verity is a leading provider of knowledge retrieval solutions. Verity's product suite powers corporate portals, e-commerce sites, online publishing and media sites, customer care applications, and products from market-leading OEMs and ISVs. Verity solutions simplify the management and use of information by indexing, classifying, organizing, searching and retrieving data, as well as providing personalized information delivery and hybrid online and CD publishing.

Verity's products are used by more than 1,000 corporations, e-commerce sites, government agencies, online service providers, Internet publishers and software developers worldwide. Verity alliances include Adobe Systems, AT&T, CDNOW, CNET, Cisco, Compaq, Dow Jones, Easy Software, EarthWeb, Ernst & Young, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, IBM, MD Consult, NewsEdge Corporation, Informix, Lotus, NEC, SAP, Siemens, Snap.com, Sybase and Time New Media.

For more information, contact Verity at info@verity.com or at World Wide Web site http://www.verity.com/ or by calling 408/541-1500.