Network Commerce Selects Verity to Deliver Strategic E-Commerce Solutions
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SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 21, 2000--
Verity Products Enable Network Commerce Business and
Consumer Customers to Quickly and Easily Find
Relevant Merchants, News, and Products
Verity, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRTY), the company powering business portals,
today announced that Network Commerce (NASDAQ:NWKC), a leading
e-commerce enabling company, has selected Verity to deliver strategic
e-commerce knowledge retrieval solutions to customers worldwide.
Network Commerce is using the Verity K2 Toolkit as an information
processing and linguistic analysis solution because of its advanced
search features, performance, scalability, flexibility and precision
technology. Currently, Verity is deployed in b2bNow.com, a
business-to-business marketplace and directory featuring over 610,000
businesses in 260 international markets, and in ShopNow.com, a leading
shopping network and directory featuring over 60,000 merchants and
over 11,000 affiliate sites. Both b2bNow.com and ShopNow.com are
divisions of Network Commerce.
"Our mission is to empower businesses by providing the technology,
services and commerce networks needed to successfully conduct
e-commerce. Search is a strategic piece of that puzzle," said Dr.
Ganapathy Krishnan, chief technology officer of Network Commerce.
"Having had a relationship with Verity for several years, we're well
aware that they have one of the most sophisticated portal
infrastructure technologies on the market. Verity's advanced query
language enables us to take user ratings of merchants and use them to
weight the search results. This helps other customers find the
merchants and products that best meet their needs. In addition,
Verity's 'fuzzy search' capability helps us fulfill our goal of
providing users with relevant information -- even if the search
request does not result in an exact match."
Network Commerce provides a "soup to nuts" e-commerce-enabling
solution allowing both large and small companies to take advantage of
the enormous potential of doing business on the Internet. The company
not only builds Web sites and provides consulting services, it also
maintains its own Web properties and online marketplaces to provide
maximum exposure to their merchants and to their customers.
According to Anthony J. Bettencourt, president of Verity, "Network
Commerce has consistently demonstrated the strength of its business
model with tremendous revenue growth, strong margins, and significant
customer growth. In addition, its business partners continue to
benefit from the enormous market opportunities created by the rapid
increase of business-to-business e-commerce. Network Commerce clearly
recognized the need for a turnkey solution that allows businesses and
merchants to focus on their core business, not the technology behind
it. We're honored that our award-winning business portal
infrastructure technology is a strategic part of their solution."
Verity provides market-leading software for building custom
knowledge retrieval applications, helping customers to automatically
analyze and intelligently refine their Web-based searches. Verity's
technology uses a combination of full text, metadata and
knowledge-based methods to index and retrieve textual information
stored in a variety of formats across corporate intranets and the
Internet. It enables the organization and relevance ranking of
selected information, thereby allowing users to filter and evaluate
information personalized to their specific needs and interests. Verity
technology delivers around-the-clock availability and scalable,
high-performance throughput for thousands of users searching over tens
of millions of documents with sub-second response.
About Verity K2 Toolkit
Verity K2 Toolkit provides a powerful infrastructure for the
development of corporate, e-commerce and B2B portals. Verity K2
Toolkit allows brokered search across multiple servers and multiple
CPUs to provide the most relevant search results from many information
sources without sacrificing the speed or accuracy of the results
displayed. As the number of users, queries, or amount of data
increases, K2 applications can keep pace with increased demands by
adding new CPUs or servers to the network without bringing down the
application. Providing 24x7 fault tolerant operations, the Verity K2
Toolkit isolates failures of individual nodes or servers from the rest
of the system, ensuring that applications are available when they are
needed.
The Verity K2 Toolkit supports tight integration with both COM and
Java(TM) object models, allowing easy integration across a wide range
of application servers and Java(TM) environments. With
industry-standard C language APIs, Verity's K2 Toolkit helps speed
application deployment and gives corporate accounts added flexibility
in application development, especially for e-commerce and
business-to-business application solutions.
About Network Commerce
Network Commerce Inc. (http://www.networkcommerce.com) is a
leading provider of technology infrastructure, services and commerce
networks for Internet sites, wireless networks, businesses and
merchants. Network Commerce's core commerce infrastructure technology,
services and commerce applications are known as the Network Commerce
CommerceSuite. Built on the CommerceSuite are the Network Commerce
Business Network and the Network Commerce Consumer Network. The
Network Commerce Consumer Network is comprised of ShopNow.com
(http://www.shopnow.com), a leading shopping network and directory
featuring over 60,000 merchants; BottomDollar.com
(http://www.bottomdollar.com), a comparison shopping network; and
SpeedyClick.com (http://www.speedyclick.com), a leading
commerce-enabled entertainment community; and over 25,500 affiliate
sites. The Network Commerce Business Network is comprised of
b2bNow.com (http://www.b2bnow.com), a business-to-business marketplace
and directory featuring over 610,000 businesses in 260 international
markets; FreeMerchant.com (http://www.freemerchant.com), a business
and merchant store builder with over 100,000 hosted businesses;
Ubarter.com (http://www.ubarter.com), a business-to-business barter
exchange network, and over 6,500 affiliate sites. Network Commerce
Inc.'s eBusiness Services division provides consulting, custom
commerce solutions, and integrated marketing services. Network
Commerce Inc. has over 600 employees and is headquartered in Seattle
with offices in California and Georgia.
About Verity
Verity is a leader in powering business portals. These include
corporate portals used for sharing information within an enterprise,
e-commerce portals for online selling and market exchange portals for
B2B activities. Business portals provide personalized information to
employees, partners, customers and suppliers.
Verity products are used by 48 of the Fortune 100 and by more than
1,000 corporations worldwide. The markets Verity serves are comprised
of e-commerce merchants, e-businesses, market exchanges, government
agencies, online service providers, Internet publishers and software
developers. Verity customers include Adobe Systems, American
Greetings, AT&T, Broadvision, CDNOW, Chapters, Cisco. CNET, Compaq,
Dow Jones, Edgar Online, Ernst & Young, Fairmarket, Financial Times,
Globe and Mail, Home Depot, IBM, Lotus, NewsEdge Corporation, SAP,
Siemens, Snap.com, Sybase, Time New Media and Timex.
This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to
Verity and the expected performance of its Verity K2 Toolkit products.
Actual results are subject to risks and uncertainties. Risks relating
to Verity and its products are set forth in its Form 10-K and other
reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
For more information, contact Verity at info@verity.com or at
World Wide Web site verity.com or by calling 408/541-1500.
Note to Editors: Verity and the Verity logo are registered
trademarks or trademarks of Verity, Inc. All other trademarks are the
property of their respective owners.
CONTACT: Verity, Inc.
Kathy Kale, 408/542-2379
kkale@verity.com
verity.com
or
Slider & Associates
Teddi Converse, 775/832-7308
teddi@sliderassociates.com |
