Cohera Corporation Taps Industry Elite for Technical Advisory Board; Highly Regarded E-business Professionals and Technology Experts to Help Guide Cohera's Product Development Strategy.

Business Editors/High-tech Writers

HAYWARD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 16, 2000

Cohera Corporation, the leading provider of e-catalogs for e-business, today announced the formation of a Technical Advisory Board composed of the industry's foremost authorities on business-to-business e-commerce and data integration.

The board will guide the strategic direction of the Cohera product line and assist in identifying and developing critical opportunities that arise in the growing business-to-business e-market industry. The counsel provided by these principal opinion leaders will help drive the strategic direction of the Cohera product line with regard to new functionality and enhancements as well as the adoption of new and evolving standards. The board will also provide guidance and counsel in the area of recommending and developing strategic and complementary partnerships and alliances.

The current members of the board include:

Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of

Cohera Corporation

Dr. Stonebraker founded Illustra Information Technologies and INGRES Corporation, two groundbreaking database companies. He is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he joined the faculty in 1971. Dr. Stonebraker also serves as CTO of Informix Corporation, is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in database technology, and is noted for his insight in operating systems and expert systems.

Dr. Joseph M. Hellerstein, Professor of Computer Technology at

the University of California at Berkeley, Co-Founder of Cohera

Corporation

Dr. Hellerstein currently serves as Cohera's chief scientist. He is involved in both academic research and industrial development of data management and analysis systems. Dr. Hellerstein is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow and was recently selected by MIT Technology Review Magazine as one of 100 leading young innovators. He is a member of the advisory board of ACM SIGMOD, the leading database research organization, and also serves on the technical advisory board of MySimon.com, a consumer-shopping portal.

Saroja Girishankar, Principal of Global Trading Hubs.com LLC 

Ms. Girishankar specializes in e-commerce strategy, and tracking trading hub and digital marketplace evolution. She works in the areas of operating systems and applications software, Internet infrastructure and IP networks, internetworking and telecommunications systems. Ms. Girishankar was most recently the executive industry editor at InternetWeek (formerly CommunicationsWeek) for 13 years. Currently, Ms. Girishankar contributes to InternetWeek, InformationWeek and Net Market Makers' publications, in addition to writing white papers and business positioning documents.

Dave Hollander, Director of E-Commerce Knowledge Management and

Interoperability for CommerceNet

Mr. Hollander currently serves as co-chair of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) XML Schema Working Group and has pioneered the information technology industry for more than 20 years with work in information management, the Internet, CD-ROM, CCITT/facsimile and the original XML project. Mr. Hollander co-authored the XML Namespaces Recommendation for the W3C, wrote "XML Applications", a book from Wrox Press, and several white papers and presentations on XML and business.

Joseph Ziegler, Director of E-Commerce for AllBusiness.com

Mr. Ziegler coordinates the design, implementation and maintenance of the e-commerce architecture for AllBusiness.com. He came to AllBusiness.com from NetGravity/DoubleClick where he was the Professional Services Technical Lead. Previously, Mr. Ziegler worked at Andersen Consulting where he focused on E-commerce/Internet projects for clients that include Netscape and YPF in Buenos Aires. Mr. Ziegler earned a BS in computer science from Texas A&M University.

Additional board members will be added to total seven industry leaders, spreading the breadth of the technology sector influencing the electronic commerce space.

"Cohera is taking an important step in assembling so many individuals who are focused on advancing B2B eCommerce standards, technologies and market strategies," said Dave Hollander of CommerceNet. "The collaboration should help Cohera maintain its current technology leadership position and should be quite exciting."

Dr. Michael Stonebraker, founder and CTO of Cohera Corporation, commented: "Cohera is proud to have developed a vision for B2B infrastructure technology that has drawn the interest of these highly respected industry thinkers. We are confident that the collaboration within the Technical Advisory Board will give our company the clearest and most complete perspective on the problems e-businesses continuously face, and how Cohera can best solve them."

About Cohera

Headquartered in Hayward, Calif., the Cohera Corporation is dedicated to providing fast-growing B2B e-commerce firms with a scalable standards-based e-catalog infrastructure to drive dynamic e-markets. Cohera is privately held and backed by such industry-leading venture firms as Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Sippl/MacDonald Ventures, Merrill Lynch Partners, Ignite Ventures and Cambridge Technology Capital. Cohera can be reached on the Web at http://www.cohera.com or by calling 510/780-1700.