Convera Announces Open Excalibur™ Partner Program; Factiva, FMS Advanced Systems Group, Language Weaver and MetaCarta Join Initiative

Business Wire, March 6, 2006

VIENNA, Va. -- Convera Corporation (NASDAQ:CNVR), a leading provider of search technologies to commercial enterprises and government agencies, today announced the addition of four partners to its Open Excalibur(TM) partner program. Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company and global provider of business news and information, FMS Advanced Systems Group, Language Weaver and MetaCarta join Convera in enhancing Excalibur's(TM) ability to solve advanced Internet search challenges.

"Convera is building an open platform for mining the Internet," said Patrick Condo, CEO of Convera. "We provide the basic infrastructure and the index/search/retrieval function on which other key technologies can be layered to solve customers' problems."

The Open Excalibur(TM) search platform provides easy integration of the 3rd party products and services by adhering to established open interface standards such as REST and XML. In addition, Convera is working with partners on an open indexing API to allow 3rd party technologies such as language processing, entity extractors, and geo-tagging to fit directly into the indexing pipeline. The Open Excalibur(TM) platform will allow customers to incorporate other best-of-breed technologies to customize the Excalibur search and analysis capabilities to their specific needs.

Convera and Factiva plan to develop a universal data box utilizing a platform built on Excalibur(TM) and representing the world's largest, deepest index of categorized and authority-ranked Web results. The companies also plan to create an open source consortium to help them target vertical markets such as government and law enforcement organizations and to launch a secure hosted data center to provide secure subscription service access to open source content.

"Our collaboration with Convera and the Excalibur Web indexing capabilities support Factiva's dedication to empowering organizations with information that users need to make better decisions faster," said Claude Green, Interim CEO, Factiva. "This initiative will also better enable Factiva to serve key roles and multiple vertical markets."

"Excalibur(TM) is seen as a search engine of distinction among many customers," said Kirti Vashee, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Language Weaver. "We were aware of the need for a contextual-based Internet search program that would enable our machine language technology to be more effective so it was a given that we would go to Convera to integrate our technology with theirs."

FMS Advanced Systems Group of Vienna, Va., is porting their Sentinel Threat Management System (TMS) link analysis suite so it can work directly with Excalibur(TM) to enable analysts and researchers to use the Internet more extensively.

Sentinel TMS represents the intuitive new standard for visualizing, analyzing and managing complex data, including 2D and 3D models, next generation Social Network Analysis and secure collaboration for workgroups. Officials at Convera and FMS see commercial applications for their technology.

"Aside from the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, we see applications in the commercial market, particularly among financial, legal and medical users that need to visualize data," said Bill Robinette, Vice President of Corporate Development for the FMS Advanced Systems Group. "Convera's technology opens a wealth of information that FMS can then display to end users."

MetaCarta's geographic search capabilities offer a natural extension to the Excalibur(TM) portfolio. The technology automatically identifies geographic references using advanced natural language processing (NLP) from unstructured content in a customer's archives, including email, web pages, newswires and cables. It then assigns a latitude and longitude to these references so that users can analyze their text archives using geographic maps, keywords and time as filters.

"MetaCarta's unique technology has already proven essential to government and commercial enterprises and our growing partnership with Convera complements the Open Excalibur(TM) program and the value of both companies to both communities," said Randy Ridley, MetaCarta's Vice President and General Manager of Public Sector Systems.

About Convera

Convera is a leading provider of search technologies to commercial enterprises and government agencies. Through its two offerings, Excalibur(TM), a newly developed Web search solution and RetrievalWare(R), its enterprise search product, Convera offers unique search technology capable of providing an integrated results page derived from both intranet and Internet content. Convera's technologies manage vast stores of structured and unstructured information that exist within internal repositories and on the Web by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search capabilities across text, video, image and audio information, in multiple languages. More than 900 customers in 40 countries rely on Convera search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications. For more information, contact Convera at 800-755-7005, via e-mail at info@convera.com or on the Web at www.convera.com