Convera Releases RetrievalWare 8.1; Six-Month Beta Program is Successf

    Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

    VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 2, 2005--Convera Corporation (NASDAQ:CNVR), a leading provider of search and categorization software for enterprises and government agencies, today announced immediate general availability of version 8.1 of the company's RetrievalWare(R) search software platform. A beta release of version 8.1 was provided to several customers, including Northrop Grumman, Unisys and EDS, during the fall of 2004. RetrievalWare 8.1 is the culmination of over three years of development efforts aimed at offering measurable improvements and enhancements to the RetrievalWare platform.
    The new, customer driven features of RetrievalWare 8.1 noted below are tailored for both the commercial and government market segments.

    New Features - RetrievalWare 8.1:

-- RetrievalWare Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval capabilities available through Web Services and Java APIs to comply with all major software architectures (.NET and J2EE) as well as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA's)

-- Semantic Indexing, Categorization, Classification, Profiling and Alerts, Search, Entity Extraction and Folder services all utilizing a single unified index

-- Unified index enables the above services to be combined in any order programmatically to support a broad array of Discovery and Text mining applications

-- Language Detection, Encoding Detection, Conversion, and UTF-8 Ready Language Processors for a complete Cross-Lingual Knowledge Discovery platform

-- 14 Language Processors, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, for Natural Language Processing

-- Pluggable cartridge architecture for semantic resources

-- Over 60 pre-supplied Domain-Specific Taxonomies and Classifications; 23 taxonomies in 9 different languages

-- 8 General and Cross-Lingual Semantic Cartridges; 22 Domain-Specific Semantic Cartridges

-- Convera Knowledge Workbench V3.0 to create, manage, tailor, benchmark and extend Taxonomy's and Semantic resources for increased search accuracy and relevance

-- A newly architected Spider 2.0 for Intranet and Internet web content

-- Supports JBoss or WebLogic Application servers at the API level which when combined with RetrievalWare high performance Core Services enables 3 tier architectures for vertical and horizontal scalability / availability

-- Significant performance enhancements

-- Improved installation and administration

    "Our application allows corporate data to be shared and provides search, retrieval, and discovery services to data stored across diverse corporate repositories through a standard interface. We are using the RetrievalWare Web Services APIs because they are well organized, straight forward, and standards based." -- Garin Clint Northrop Grumman, Program Manager - Textual Information Systems.
    For more information on the latest release of RetrievalWare, download the RetrievalWare 8.1 brochure at http://www.convera.com/litcenter.

    In Other News

    Current customers and prospects are invited to attend Convera's upcoming "User Group Meeting" scheduled for May 5, 2005 in Bethesda, Maryland. For more information on this User Group Meeting, and to register, please visit: http://www.convera.com/events/fug/.

    About Convera

    Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise knowledge discovery solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare(R) solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 50 languages. More than 900 customers in 33 countries rely on Convera's knowledge discovery solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, content and document management systems, and business applications for news production, intelligence analysis, drug discovery, regulatory compliance, customer service, and more. For more information, contact Convera at 800-755-7005, via e-mail at info@convera.com or on the Web at http://www.convera.com/

    This release, including any statements from Convera personnel, contains statements about Convera's future expectations, performance, plans, and prospects, as well as assumptions about future events. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including without limitation, business and economic conditions and trends; continued success in technological advances and development including the Web initiative; possible disruption in commercial activities caused by terrorist activity and armed conflict, such as changes in logistics and security arrangements; reduced customer demand relative to expectations; competitive factors; and other risk factors listed from time to time in the company's SEC reports. Actual results may differ materially from our expectations as the result of these and other important factors relating to Convera's business and product development efforts, which are further described in Convera's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings can be obtained from the SEC's website located at www.sec.gov. Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to Convera on the date of this release, and Convera assumes no obligation to update such statements. The Convera design logo and the following are worldwide trademarks of Convera: Convera(TM), RetrievalWare(R), and Screening Room(R). The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

--30--RB/ph*

CONTACT: Convera Corporation John R. Polchin, 703-761-3700

KEYWORD: VIRGINIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: HARDWARE SOFTWARE NETWORKING INTERNET E-COMMERCE PRODUCT SOURCE: Convera Corporation

Copyright Business Wire 2005