Paris-based PLM provider Dassault Systèmes today announced that it will spend approximately €135 million to acquire fellow French company Exalead, a search technology specialist founded in 2000 by former executives of search engine company AltaVista.
Exalead’s technology will enhance Dassault’s core technology portfolio even as it opens the company to new sales opportunities outside its traditional product lifecycle management roots, officials told Managing Automation today.
As a first order of business, Dassault has begun integrating the Exalead technology into the ENOVIA suite of 3D-based products, said Michel Tellier, ENOVIA’s CEO, in an interview today. The Exalead technology is based on the same premise that drives large crowds of Internet users to search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing: Just as web surfers need an organizing tool to find valuable information on the web, so, too, do product designers need quick access to contextual information related to their design projects.
“Your first job as a designer is not to design a new part,” Tellier said, noting that engineers “have a tendency to reengineer every time instead of being more [like] configurators.”