ABN AMRO's NSMD Bank France Selects Convera's RetrievalWare for Countrywide Knowledge Management Initiative.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 15, 2003

Leading International Bank's New Portal Provides Faster, More Precise Information Access

Convera (Nasdaq:CNVR), a leading provider of search and categorization software for enterprises and government agencies, today announced NSMD Bank (Banque de Neuflize, Schlumberger, Mallet, Demachy), a private bank specialized in administration of assets and a subsidiary of the international bank ABN AMRO France is using Convera's search platform to power its new intranet portal and streamline the way information is delivered to staff. More than 800 employees throughout NSMD's operations in France now have faster, more efficient access to thousands of text and graphics documents that were previously scattered across multiple and disparate information sources.

NSMD Bank chose to deploy RetrievalWare(R) for its security features, ability to handle a large number of diverse file formats, and for its unique categorization capabilities. RetrievalWare's security functionality offers users the convenience of a single sign-on when searching across a variety of repositories. RetrievalWare restricts access not only to classified or user-specific repositories, but also to individual documents in accordance with the bank's security protocols.

"RetrievalWare not only searches across the content of a document, but across each document's security properties," said Leon Benzrihem, Enterprise Repository Manager, ABN AMRO's NSMD Bank. "RetrievalWare automatically detects the user permissions and controls established by the bank's four system administrators and eliminates titles and summaries of classified documents from the 'search results lists' of unauthorized users."

Another important requirement, NSMD Bank needed a search and categorization solution that could handle numerous types of document and graphics files. RetrievalWare supports a wide range of disparate information assets, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, and over 200 proprietary document formats.

"Convera made the difference here because among those that competed for our business, RetrievalWare was the only solution able to handle Microsoft Project, Igraphics and Visio," added Mr. Benzrihem. "For our intranet search needs, it was important we utilize a search engine that would enable us to work with a diverse number of file formats."

RetrievalWare's semantic network-based categorization capabilities support multi-level categories and administrative control of category creation and maintenance. The category administrator can determine how categories are populated by changing the relevance of document properties such as the name, author, document creation date, etc. which was significant for NSMD Bank.

About Convera's RetrievalWare

RetrievalWare is a high-performance multimedia, cross- and multi-lingual search platform that allows broad flexibility and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets. RetrievalWare enables users to index and search a wide range of distributed information resources, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, over 200 proprietary document formats (such as word processors and publishing systems), relational database tables, document management systems, and groupware repositories. Advanced search capabilities -- concept and keyword searching, pattern searching, and query-by-example -- can be used independently or interactively to enable the highest levels of accuracy. RetrievalWare excels in distributed client/server environments with thousands of users, documents, images, and/or multiple media assets.

About Convera

Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search and categorization solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured 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 45 languages. More than 800 customers in over 29 countries rely on Convera's search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more. For more information, contact Convera at [phone], via e-mail at [e-mail] or on the Web at 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; 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.