Kingfisher Chooses Verity to Power New E-Commerce Initiative
Verity K2 Toolkit Enables e-Kingfisher to Turn Browsers into Buyers
SUNNYVALE, CA - 2000-10-19 - Verity, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRTY), a leading provider of infrastructure software that powers enterprise and e-commerce portals as well as e-business applications, today announced that Kingfisher plc, one of Europe's leading retailers, with a clear focus on the home and family, will use the Verity K2 Toolkit to help manage information throughout its new e-commerce initiative, e-Kingfisher.
Kingfisher, with over 2,900 stores in 15 countries, has some of the best known retail brands in Europe, including Woolworths, B&Q, Castorama, Comet, Darty, and Superdrug. In response to increasing customer demands for online store presence, Kingfisher created a dedicated e-commerce division called e-Kingfisher, in June 2000. This division consists of five business units; DIY, Electrical, Woolworths, Health and Beauty and e-Kingfisher investments.
"With such a content-rich site offering so many products, we had to find a way of allowing customers to search for things in their own terms. Only quality portal infrastructure technology, including advanced search, navigate, and view capabilities, combined with good quality customer information can provide the solution," says Stuart Moore, head of systems, e-Kingfisher. "Verity is our chosen tool on which to build this important customer service. We identified Verity early on in the process as a company with a market-leading product that could integrate quickly with our core technologies. In addition, Verity demonstrated a high desire to work with us to build excellent and cost effective services."
The success of e-Kingfisher partly depends on customers being able to find the product information that they need as quickly as possible. This is often difficult as customers use different words to describe a product. Verity's products are designed to ensure that, even if a different name is used, or the name is misspelled, the product information will be brought to the customer quickly and accurately, dramatically improving the usability of the e-Kingfisher site for customers.
According to Simon Atkinson, UK managing director, Verity, "Thanks to the Internet, consumers are being presented with more choice and availability. However, this needs to be carefully managed to ensure that the right products and information are getting to the right customers. We're very honored that our robust and scalable technology will be used to enable e-Kingfisher customers to quickly and easily locate products they need. With Verity, Kingfisher also has the security that it needs to ensure that the right product information is readily available in order to enhance this channel's potential."
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 Javaobject models, allowing easy integration across a wide range of application servers and Java environments. With industry-standard C language APIs, Verity's K2 Toolkit helps speed portal application deployment and gives customers added flexibility in application development, especially for e-commerce and business-to-business application solutions.
About Kingfisher
Kingfisher is one of Europe's largest retailers, with a clear focus on the home and family, with over 2,900 stores in 15 countries. Employing more than 130,000 people, Kingfisher operates principally through its two-pan European businesses in DIY and Electricals and its UK High Street general merchandise sector. Driven by a common commitment to understand and meet changing customer needs more effectively than competitors, Kingfisher encompasses some of the best known retail brands in Europe, including B&Q, Castorama, Comet, Darty, BUT, Woolworths, and Superdrug.
With leading positions in attractive growth markets across Europe and growing worldwide interests, Kingfisher now achieves around 40% of its annualized sales outside the UK.
About e-Kingfisher
Kingfisher has created this dedicated e-commerce division which consists of five discrete business units; DIY, Electrical, Woolworths, Health and Beauty, and e-Kingfisher investments. Kingfisher has already made significant e-commerce investments in leading European e-commerce companies, including heimwerker.de, Screwfix, improveline.com, LibertySurf, and ThinkNatural.
About Verity
Verity is a leader in nfrastructure software that powers 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 products and technologies. Actual results are subject to risks and uncertainties, including the risk that the implementation of Verity's products will be delayed due to unforeseen technical difficulties and the risk that the products may not meet customers' needs or perform as described. 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 http://www.verity.com or call 408-541-1500.
Verity and the Verity logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Verity, Inc.
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