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Adriaan Bloem

Exalead acquired by Dassault Systemes

9-Jun-2010

Tags: Enterprise Search, European Marketplace, Mobile Computing, Vendor Viability & Financials, blueKiwi Suite, CloudView, Manufacturing, Publishing-Media, Retail

Dassault Systèmes, a major product lifecycle management (PLM) vendor, has announced the acquisition of enterprise search vendor Exalead. Which of course leads to the two usual questions with any acquisition: what will change for existing Exalead customers, and what will happen to the product in the future?

On the surface, this is a run-of-the-mill strategic acquisition. Dassault has built a business around its 3D technology, and now has a software suite to accommodate the whole conceive, design, realize, and service PLM process. It's become one of the most major vendors in that business (with revenues of €1,251m in 2009) and has enough cash to move from a recently announced OEM partnership to a full-blown acquisition in less than a month. Exalead has been pushing "SBAs" ("search based applications") built on top of its CloudView search infrastructure. There should be plenty of opportunities to integrate that search technology into the PLM cycle.

But there's a little bit more to it than that. The press release struggles to pithily convey it, quoting Yvan Proteau of Yellow Pages: "The combination of these entities will help organizations like ours create better user experiences based on the delivery of information and data in an innovative manner that leverages the latest in 3D technology that consumers have long demanded."

Wait... what? Are we going to see a Yellow Pages iPhone app that uses Exalead to understand what mood you're in, and then uses Dassault technology to display suggested restaurants in 3D?

Actually, they're already halfway there. Yellow Pages recently launched the Urbanizer app, which uses Exalead to recommend places based on your mood. And Dassault has created 3dvia, where users can build 3D environments on-line.

Both companies have a history of generating revenue out of their core technology, and then branching out in all directions from that. For Dassault, the bread-and-butter is 3D and PLM; but it also created 3dvia, and invested in community & collaboration vendor blueKiwi. Exalead's main business is enterprise search; a few years ago, mostly indexing Lotus repositories, and more recently, building larger (and more custom) enterprise integrations. But Exalead also built a large public web search engine, indexed the French President's speeches, and powered an iPhone app.

Normally, with an acquisition like this, I would caution any current or potential customer to think carefully whether the priorities of new owners will still be with their scenarios. However, both Dassault and Exalead have shown they're strongly engineering-driven, and unafraid to trod off the beaten path. With a new wealthy parent, Exalead is not likely to shut down its more exotic projects as irrelevant extravagances. There will be plenty of search applications for Dassault's PLM, and I'm fairly certain Exalead will hold on to its current customers. But don't be surprised to also see an animated, 3d, mood-sensing Yellow Pages search on an iPhone 4 next year.