New Verity K2 Enterprise Takes Knowledge Management To Higher Level of Power, Flexibility and Value


Verity Software Lets Organizations Optimize Intellectual Capital As Never Before

Features Unique LexisNexis Content Organizer and “Exceptional” Relational Taxonomies Classification Capability

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – July 1, 2002 – In a move that further demonstrates the superior strength and versatility of its Verity K2 technology platform, Verity, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRTY), a leading provider of infrastructure software powering corporate intranets and e-commerce sites as well as e-business applications, today announced a powerful new version of its Verity K2 Enterprise (K2E) software. The new release, K2E 4.5, offers state-of-the-art features and functionality that will enable global organizations to perform knowledge management activities better, realize a better return on their knowledge assets, and, as a result, make better business decisions.

“Verity K2 Enterprise is infrastructure software that can help companies move their knowledge management efforts from mere experiments to mission-critical activities that contribute to their businesses’ success in measurable ways,” said Anthony J. Bettencourt, president, Verity, Inc. “We believe Verity K2E is as essential to a company’s performance as any enterprise application.”

Verity K2E is the only software of its kind that fully integrates the three tiers of knowledge management infrastructure, which are, according to Forrester Research, search, taxonomy and personalization. Verity is able to combine these crucial capabilities because of the three-tier architecture of its Verity K2 technology platform, used by more than 1,500 companies worldwide. The Verity K2 platform lets K2E users discover, organize and connect with their enterprises’ greatest information assets – an array of documents and the experts behind them, who know and understand those businesses. It also offers one of the most sophisticated, yet easy to manage administrative infrastructures to better cope with enterprise complexity.

More Accurate Content Organization
The growing challenge for knowledge management is providing effective and efficient means to help people cope with the enormous amount of diverse information to be found inside and outside their companies. The process of finding that relevant information quickly and easily starts with organizing taxonomies or categories of information with extreme accuracy.

Verity K2 Enterprise provides customers with a flexible and accurate classification solution that combines machine learning with domain expertise. This combination yields up to 99 percent classification accuracy. Verity’s Logistic Regression Classification (LRC) technology makes the accuracy of its automatic classification technology unsurpassed.

Unique LexisNexis™ Content Organizer
Only Verity offers the LexisNexis™ Content Organizer, a product exclusive to companies that use K2E. The LexisNexis Content Organizer provides businesses with pre-built taxonomies to automatically classify enterprise information. With decades of experience organizing complex business and legal information, LexisNexis taxonomies have been built, tested and fine-tuned by some of the most respected classification professionals in the world. The LexisNexis Content Organizer also allows the Verity customers to combine their own enterprise-specific rules to organize their information the way they do business.

“We believe Verity K2 Enterprise supported with LexisNexis’ unmatched expertise in systematizing complex business information provides companies with a compelling enhancement to their knowledge management efforts,” said Renee Citera, vice president of enterprise market planning for LexisNexis.

"In my experience, the LexisNexis taxonomies are incomparable," said Robert Holt, manager of technical operations for NPR Online. "They cover the full gamut of topic areas, from business and finance to regulation and international issues, and they help us organize our archive so npr.org users can find the information they need faster and more accurately."

“Exceptional” Relational Taxonomies
Verity K2E gives users a multitude of ways to quickly find the information they need. The search tools include federated search, which brings back results from many sources to a single query, parametric search, which finds single or groups of documents with specific attributes, category drill-down to let users browse through categories and subcategories, and relational taxonomies, which enables simultaneous search of two or more taxonomies for powerful discovery capabilities.

According to Dr. Raj Reddy, the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, "Verity has been an industry leader in providing solutions for Knowledge Management. Verity's latest offering, K2 Enterprise 4.5, is a significant step in Knowledge Management. The ability to implement an intelligent content organization capability that allows multiple taxonomies to co-deploy, co-exist, and co-navigate is state-of-the-art -- and beneficial to the end-users."

Return on Knowledge Assets
Verity K2E is designed to allow organizations to realize a better return on their three most valuable assets: their people, their documents and mission-critical enterprise applications.

It includes a Recommendation Engine that automatically suggests documents as well as the experts behind them. Using Verity’s patent-pending Tensor Space Analysis (TSA) technology, the Recommendation Engine recognizes the social networks that exist within a corporate online environment, and uses them to enhance the flow of knowledge throughout an enterprise.

K2E’s auto-initialization and intelligent indexing features let content in existing LDAP-type and other repositories to be integrated easily into a new knowledge management solution, making better use of that content, and reducing total cost of ownership. K2E also offers the ability to fully leverage existing content management systems while adding more powerful discovery and organization capabilities to them.

The Verity Gateway Development Kit, a component of K2E, permits creation of linkages with and search of content to be found in all the leading enterprise applications. Its application-aware indexing means K2E is highly capable of finding crucial information on business-critical applications, such as CRM and ERP programs.

Knowledge Asset Protection
The value of knowledge assets can quickly diminish if the information is accessed by unauthorized users. Verity K2E offers superior document-level security of repository information by allowing organizations to use existing access procedures without compromise. Individuals not authorized to see a certain document would never learn that it exists within the enterprises’ knowledge bank, even through stray queries. In addition, single sign-on security solutions are supported by K2E for simplicity and control.

About Verity
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Verity is a leading provider of business portal infrastructure software. Verity software gives businesses a multitude of ways to improve access to vital information and perform a range of e-business operations, while enhancing the end-user experience. Verity-powered business portals, which include corporate portals used for sharing information within an enterprise; e-commerce portals for online selling; and market exchange portals for B2B activities, all provide personalized information to employees, partners, customers and suppliers.

Verity products are used by approximately 80 percent of the Fortune 50 and by more than 1,500 corporations in various markets. Customers include Adobe Systems, AT&T, Cisco, CNET, Compaq, Dow Jones, EDGAR Online, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, FairMarket, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Home Depot, Lotus, NewsEdge Corporation, SAP, Siemens, Sybase, Time New Media and Timex.

The statements in this press release regarding the benefits that Verity expects customers will receive from Verity K2 Enterprise 4.5 are forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, including the risk that: the benefits may not be obtained due to technical or other reasons; and the structure of certain customers’ organizations may not be conducive to realizing on these benefits. Other risks relating to Verity and its products are set forth in the “risk factor” sections of its latest Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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

Verity and the Verity logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Verity, Inc.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Verity Editorial Contacts:

Steve Hoechster
Alliant Public Relations+
646-495-5401 or 914-393-9219
steve.hoechster@alliantpr.com

Winifred Shum
Verity, Inc.
408-542-2363
wshum@verity.com