Dassault Systèmes expands its footprint

Dassault Systèmes announced yesterday that it had acquired Exalead, a French company best known for providing CloudView technology that powers websites such as ViaMichelin, Carlson Wagonlit and RealTravel.com. For ViaMichelin, for example, CloudView combined dynamic mapping with corporate information, web content and user-generated content for 15 million points of interest, including hotels, restaurants and attractions. Add in results navigation and proximity search, and you get a nifty engine to plan travel, book lodging and discover interesting points along a route. According to one report, ViaMichelin processes around 800 queries per second. But Exalead’s products are also used within corporate firewalls, and the company reports that over 100 million people rely on Exalead for information search, access and reporting, at organizations such as Sanofi-Aventis and World Bank.

In May, DS had announced that it was partnering with Exalead to deliver advanced PLM enterprise search capabilities in the ENOVIA V6 platform. At that time, DS and Exalead said that “CloudView uses minimal hardware but provides high scalability, which helps reduce overall TCO [total cost of ownership]. Additionally, it uses advanced semantic technologies to automatically analyze, categorize, enhance and align data to deliver more accurate, precise and relevant search results.”

According to the companies, Exalead creates platforms for Search-Based Applications (SBAs), or search and indexing plus standard Web technology. Its twist is that it has expanded the realm of search to include things like color limits in image search (via its Chromatik product), the links between people and websites (with its Constellations product) and searches text within videos (Voxalead).

Bernard Charlès, CEO of Dassault Systèmes explains the rationale for the acquisition as follows: “Everyone is looking for simplicity with intuitive applications (“life-like”) which value the rich information available inside and outside companies. With Exalead and its partners, we can provide a new class of search-based applications for collaborative communities.”

Why this had to be done via an acquisition and what DS intends to do with the customers Exalead supports in industries far removed from PLM remains to be seen. The acquisition has already closed and is valued at about €135 million.