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.

Founded by Jim Dowe in February 1980,[3][4] Excalibur sought to exploit neural networks through its proprietary Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing (APRP).

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.

[7] 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.

[9] Condo continued to architect and build out a complete multimedia/semantic, software as a service search platform, partnering with Ronald J. Whittier, head of Intel's interactive media division.

Vogel, as Convera CTO, drove the development of the new categorization and dynamic classification capabilities while bolstering the extensive search and discovery strengths of the platform, including facets and a multi-million term ontology.

In a December 3, 2004 article in The Washington Post, Condo disclosed the company's strategy to apply the technology built for the intelligence community to an advanced development project to index the Web.