Convera Corporation – Result Of A Merger That Took Place Between Two Companies.

We are already familiar with the famous Google and Bing search engines, and we know how amazingly those search engines have changed our lives. From finding out a good institution for studies to finding a chocolate cake recipe in seconds, everything is so easy because of them. Apart from Google and Bing, there are many more that have been consumers’ favourites for a long time, whether it is Baidu, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. But there are some other search engines as well that have been designed to serve a particular purpose. There are companies like Convera Corporation, making such dedicated software products for their clients. Convera Corporation is mainly known for its flagship product, RetrievalWar, which is widely used by Microsoft even after its retirement in 2007.

About Convera Corporation

Convera is a twenty years old technology company, mainly known for its corporate search engine development. The company though is today a part of Firstlight ERA and operates as NTENT today, it has made its name solely through its flagship product RetrievalWare, which the company launched as Convera.
Convera was founded in 2000, with its headquarters established in Vienna, VA, United States. The company was already a result of the merger of Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation, and later, it again merged with Firstlight ERA in 2010 to form NTENT. As Convera, the company’s annual revenue for FY2009 was estimated to be 1.3 million USD, and as NTENT, the company is doing equally well.

Founding the Company

Convera Corporation was the result of a merger that took place between Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation in the year 2000. The latter has been in the search engine industry for a longer time, and this experience was put to good use for Convera Corporation. On the other hand, Intel’s Interactive division’s expertise was also a boon for the company. Convera bagged Intel’s contract with the National Baseball Association for the distribution of the NBA content in the first year of its inception.
In the year 2002, Convera acquired Semantix Inc. that specialized in cross-lingual processing as well as computational linguistics technology, helping the company add more features to its products. The company had started to offer SaasS vertical search services, and its RetrievalWare became the favourite of governments of the UK, the US, Canada, and a few more countries. In fact, Microsoft still uses the same software to date.
Also, Convera’s vertical search service had attracted customers like John Wiley & Sons., Centaur Media, Incisive Media, etc. In February 2010, Convera merged with Firstlight ERA and formed NTENT, a company that still offers the web-scale semantic search for vertical applications, as Convera Corporation did as an independent company. NTENT’s headquarters is based in New York City, New York, United States, and Pat Condo is the CEO of the company, who also led Excalibur Technologies (one of the merging companies to form Convera) and Convera as the CEO.

The CEO at Convera Corporation

Patrick C. Condo was the CEO and President of Convera Corporation. In the 80s, Condo served Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a company that distributed Excalibur Technologies’ products. Excalibur was one the companies that merged to form Convera. In the early 90s, Condo joined Excalibur, and in five years, he became the CEO and President of Excalibur. While developing a SaaS search platform in partnership with Intel, in 2000, Excalibur and Intel’s interactive media division had a merger and Condo became the CEO of the newly formed Convera Corporation. After ten years in the business, Convera then merged with NTENT, and Condo held the CEO position at NTENT as well.