Press Release

NETSCAPE TO AQUIRE COLLABRA SOFTWARE

COMPANY AIMS TO EXTEND LEAD INTO COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND MESSAGING MARKET

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (September 21, 1995) -- Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: NSCP) today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Collabra Software, Inc., the leading independent developer of collaborative computing software. The acquisition is aimed at extending Netscape's position as a premier open software provider for linking people and information over enterprise networks and the Internet into the burgeoning collaboration and messaging market.

"By combining Collabra's products and technologies with our own, we broaden our ability to offer customers strong, integrated solutions for easily communicating and collaborating within and beyond the enterprise using open standards," said Jim Barksdale, president and CEO of Netscape. "We also gain the benefit of Collabra's tremendous team of people, who bring world-class expertise in providing messaging and collaborative technologies."

"With the overwhelming majority of our enterprise customers wanting to integrate their internal messaging systems with the Internet, we are extremely excited to join Netscape," said Eric Hahn, president and CEO of Collabra. "Working with Netscape's outstanding team will enable us to deliver our market-leading collaboration technology on the platform our customers are requesting. The result of this agreement will be a state-of-the-art client/server, platform-independent product family based on open standards."

Netscape will purchase 100 percent of Collabra, a privately held company, for 1.85 million shares of Netscape stock, to be accounted for as a pooling of interests. The deal is expected to close on or before January 31, 1996.

Collabra Software, located close to Netscape in Mountain View, California, was founded in 1993 by Eric Hahn, former GM of Lotus' market-leading cc:Mail Division, to develop messaging-based collaborative computing products. The company's management and technical teams have extensive expertise in collaborative computing solutions. Collabra currently employs 47 people, including more than 20 engineers.

Collabra's flagship product, Collabra Share, first shipped in July 1994 and quickly emerged as a leading group conferencing and information sharing application. Collabra Share makes teams more effective, collaboration more affordable, and organizational learning automatic by providing electronic discussion forums where people can distribute and discuss information. Collabra Share leverages companies' existing messaging infrastructures including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Mail, Novell Groupwise, Banyan BeyondMail and Lotus cc:Mail.

"Our customers on enterprise networks have asked us for collaboration and messaging tools to enable people in their organizations to work together more effectively," said Marc Andreessen, vice president of technology for Netscape. "Our research showed Collabra's technology to be best-of-class for providing open systems, collaborative computing solutions. By integrating Collabra's technology tightly into the Netscape open systems platform, we can provide our customers with the first comprehensive collaboration and communications platform spanning the enterprise and the Internet."

Netscape will incorporate Collabra's collaboration and messaging capabilities into future versions of Netscape Navigator and Netscape server products and will offer these capabilities on Netscape's supported platforms. These combined products will dramatically extend Netscape's open systems commitment to the corporate collaboration and messaging markets, and will combine state-of-the-art functionality, platform independence and a client/server architecture.

The companies' products will be integrated in two phases:

The combined companies will remain committed to the Collabra Share 2.0 product line. Netscape will continue to market, support and evolve Collabra Share 2.0.
Throughout 1996, Netscape will release upgrades to Netscape Navigator and Netscape servers which will begin to integrate Collabra Share. Netscape Navigator customers will be able to begin taking advantage of Collabra's state-of-the-art collaboration features. The companies plan for the next major release of Netscape Navigator -- following version 2.0 of Netscape Navigator which was announced earlier this week -- to incorporate fully the Collabra Share functionality within the Netscape open systems platform. This next-generation product suite will support open standards -- including TCP/IP and open mail protocols such as SMTP, IMAP, and POP -- as well as MAPI, and will be an integrated client/server, platform-independent collaboration and messaging environment for open systems.

This product strategy will provide a logical upgrade path for customers currently using Netscape and Collabra products. Customers using open networks or who are migrating to open networks will get the advantages of both the Collabra and Netscape product families.

Netscape Communications Corporation is a premier provider of open software to enable people and companies to exchange information and conduct commerce over the Internet and other global networks. The company was founded in April 1994 by Dr. James H. Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc., a Fortune 500 computer systems company; and Marc Andreessen, creator of the NCSA Mosaic research prototype for the Internet. Traded on Nasdaq under the symbol "NSCP", Netscape Communications Corporation is based in Mountain View, California.

Netscape Communications, the Netscape Communications logo, Netscape, Netscape Commerce Server, Netscape Communications Server, Netscape Proxy Server and Netscape News Server are trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation. NCSA Mosaic is a trademark of the University of Illinois. All other product names are trademarks of their respective companies.