In a surprising move, Convera Corporation sold its RetrievalWare solution - which accounts for most of Convera's revenue - to Norwegian enterprise search vendor Fast Search & Transfer. With dwindling sales, Convera has bet on "customized vertical Web search applications" and is effectively abandoning the enterprise search arena. FAST, on the other hand, hopes the deal will help them gain a foothold in the governmental market, where most of RetrievalWare's customers reside. However, whether Convera's U.S. defense and intelligence customers will allow a Scandinavian vendor to "provide access to next generation search capabilities" remains to be seen, and the daunting upgrade to FAST's technology may well provide the opportunity to think twice.