FBI picks Convera search platform

Software company Convera Corp. won a contract worth more than $2 million to provide an agency-wide search and discovery platform for the FBI, the company said today.

The contract covers a perpetual license for the company's RetrievalWare software as the search technology.

RetrievalWare will allow FBI analysts at the agency's headquarters and field offices to quickly search its counterterrorism and Automated Case Systems databases for specific intelligence information to respond to homeland security threats. Convera's solution will notify analysts when a new document matching their search query is added to a database. It also will enable analysts to search video and audio archives and to run searches in more than 45 languages.

In addition to the one-time license fee for the software, the FBI will pay Convera an annual maintenance fee of approximately $250,000, said Pat Condo, the company's chief executive officer.

The new award is a follow-on from an earlier contract worth approximately $1.5 million issued last October for search and categorization software for the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse.

The Investigative Data Warehouse system provides a Web-based environment for hundreds of FBI agents to use more than 1 billion text, video, audio and image files. It was created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to improve the sharing of intelligence data across multiple government agencies.

Based in Vienna, Va., Convera provides search, retrieval and categorization software for commercial and federal customers.

Some of the company's other federal clients include the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice and State departments, the IRS, NASA's Johnson Space Center, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Social Security Administration. Convera employs approximately 200 workers and had revenue of $29.3 million for the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2004.