Convera Corporation
| Private | |
| Industry | Internet, Computer software |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Vienna, VA, United States |
|
Key people
|
Patrick C. Condo, President and CEO Matthew G. Jones, CFO |
| Revenue |
 1.3 million USD (2009) |
 23 million USD (2009) |
|
|
Number of employees
|
32 |
| Website | convera.com |
Patrick C. Condo, President and CEO
Ronald J. Whittier
Convera was formed in December 2000 by the merger of Intel's Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation. Until 2007, Convera's primary focus was the enterprise search market through its flagship product, RetrievalWare, which is widely used within the secure government sector in the United States, UK, Canada and a number of other countries. Convera sold its enterprise search business to FAST Search & Transfer in August 2007 for $23 million, at which point RetrievalWare was officially retired.Microsoft Corporation continues to maintain RetrievalWare for its existing customer base.
In February 2010, Convera Corporation merged with Firstlight ERA to become NTENT[1], bringing with it its web-scale semantic search engine.
Excalibur Technologies had a history of search technology development dating back to the early 1980s. Founded by Jim Dowe in February 1980, Excalibur sought to exploit neural networks through its proprietary Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing (APRP). In 1985, the Company entered into a multiyear research, development and royalty contract with Nikkei Information Systems Co., Ltd. ("NIS"), a Japanese company. For the Japanese market, Excalibur packaged the technology for broader adoption. Dowe presented TICOL: A Development Tool For Fifth Generation Programming Environments along with Mr. Toshi Arai of NIS at the 1988 Forth Conference on Programming Environments. The conference was hosted by the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Rochester. In parallel, Excalibur demonstrated several successful applications of APRP pattern matching using multimedia data types (including text data, signal data, and video data) and packaged these as TRS, SRS and VRS targeted to US government agencies. One of those early applications of APRP for text retrieval proved that pattern matching search tolerated spelling variations and optical character recognition (OCR) processing errors over large volumes of scanned/OCR material. This led to the release of Excalibur EFS for electronic filing and search.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) began distributing the Excalibur products in 1990. Pat Condo represented DEC in the transaction and later joined Excalibur and began to package the technology behind the applications into a server-based offering. In 1995, Condo was named President/CEO. That same year Excalibur acquired Conquest for its scalable, distributed software architecture and renamed the product to RetrievalWare. The acquisition provided real-time profiling, boolean search, statistical and heuristic search, natural language query, semantic network tools, knowledge bases, and a complete set of application development tools. On May 5, 1997, the Company acquired Interpix Software Corporation ("Interpix") located in Santa Clara, California, a privately owned company and developer of a commercial technology enabling the collection, indexing, management and presentation of multimedia data on the Internet and corporate intranets.
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