Dassault Deal Brings Social Media to Design Table

Veteran CAD and PLM vendor Dassault Systemes made a recent acquisition that's bound to confuse a lot of traditional engineers still scratching their heads over where the Web and social media fit into the product development equation.

For an estimated $26 million, Dassault snapped up Netvibes, which markets what's billed as sentiment analytics technology that large companies like Coca-Cola and the US Department of Energy use to track their social media presence throughout the real-time Web. Simply put, what Netvibes does is create a real-time dashboard that serves up intel on customer sentiment related to brand image, product preference, and even rate of adoption.

Newly appointed executive vice president for Industry, Marketing, and Corporate Communications Monica Menghini put it this way in her explanation of what Netvibes technology actually does:

Finally, something to connect this amorphous social intelligence thing to something concrete related to Dassault's bread and butter -- 3D engineering applications. Menghini and Dassault's top dog and visionary, Bernard Charles, positioned Netvibes as one of the pieces of its newly dubbed 3D Experience platform. This is its vision for the post-PLM era where designers, engineers, marketing managers, and consumers connect in a new social enterprise where they deliver "experiences" to consumers as part of their continuous innovation.