Cohera Selects AltaVista's Search Engine Technology To Enhance B2B Exchanges; B2B E-Marketplaces Gain Competitive Advantage with Expanded Search Capabilities for Electronic Catalogs.

Business Editors

HAYWARD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 26, 2000

Cohera(TM) Corporation, the leading provider of e-catalogs for e-business, and AltaVista Company, the premier global Internet search provider, today announced an agreement to incorporate AltaVista Search Engine 3.0 into the Cohera E-Catalog System(TM) for Cohera's online business-to-business exchange customers.

AltaVista Search Engine 3.0 a fast, scalable and highly customizable search product, will be embedded within the Cohera E-Catalog System. The agreement further expands Cohera's online catalog searching capabilities by providing searching alternatives to meet individual preferences of the vastly different e-market makers and corporate exchanges. Shortening search times and increasing the number of successful searches enhances the buyer's experience and allows for substantial scalability, providing a competitive advantage to e-markets and corporate exchanges.

"E-marketplace customers have individual needs based on their marketplace-specific priorities," said Michael Laven, president and CEO of Cohera Corporation. "Cohera is able to solve its customers' search problems regardless of the data type. We have chosen to partner with only leading technologies, and AltaVista provides our customers with a key advantage to searching the marketplace: a powerful, proven, scalable technology that retrieves relevant data quickly and easily."

The Cohera E-Catalog System allows customers to automate the process of creating, managing, producing and controlling digital product information for dynamic, electronic catalogs within an e-marketplace where buyers and suppliers come together to conduct business-to-business commerce. AltaVista's search technology provides Cohera's fast-growing customers features that include auto-correcting misspellings, applying synonyms and searching all forms of a search term within the electronic catalog. Cohera's search capabilities give customers a full range of options, including analytical searching, guided-field searching and fuzzy searching capabilities.

"We are pleased to work with Cohera, a leader in B2B electronic cataloging technology," said Dan Stickel, vice president and general manager, AltaVista Search and Business Solutions. "As B2B e-commerce evolves, differentiation becomes critical. The user's experience hinges upon quickly finding what he is looking for. AltaVista will provide Cohera's customers with a scalable, highly customizable search utility that enables users to easily find exactly what they need."

About the Cohera E-Catalog System

Released in January 2000, the Cohera E-Catalog System uniquely aggregates and presents commerce-critical data from several sources within a single dynamic online "catalog" regardless of the original data's format, platform, location or ownership. Depending on the business relationship with a particular supplier, e-market makers can use the Cohera E-Catalog System to either "scrape" information from the supplier's public Web page or access that data directly from the supplier's source catalog. As the relationships with suppliers progress, the E-Catalog System provides users with a clear and evolutionary migration path at every step between a loosely coupled (scraping of static information) to tightly coupled (dynamic data retrieval) relationship.

About AltaVista Business Solutions

AltaVista Business Solutions licenses industry-leading AltaVista search engine products and hosted services to e-commerce companies, portals and global enterprises. AltaVista search technology is one of the fastest, most reliable and most scalable search tools for Web businesses. AltaVista Business Solutions has more than 900 customers worldwide. Additional information is available on the AltaVista Business Solutions Web site at http://solutions.altavista.com. AltaVista is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

About Cohera Corporation

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. The company works closely with industry-leading corporations such as Breakaway Solutions (NASDAQ:BWAY), Altro Solutions, Nichimen Data Systems, RSA Security (NASDAQ:RSAS), and webMethods (NASDAQ:WEBM). Customers include Foodservice.com and AllBusiness.com. 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.

A Web seminar discussing Cohera's E-Catalog System is planned for July 13, 2000 at 2:00 p.m. EST. Cohera will be at DCI's eB2B World in Santa Clara, Calif. June 27-29, and Enterprise Outlook June 28-29. Web seminar registration and further information about Cohera can be found at http://www.cohera.com or by calling [phone].

Cohera, Cohera E-Catalog System, the Cohera logo, and the E-Catalogs for E-Business tagline are trademarks of Cohera Corporation. All others are properties of their holders.