Dassault acquires Netvibes to track brand buzz

The cloud-based brand management service was profitable and not for sale before Dassault came calling. It will be added to other enterprise services.

By Kathleen Maher

During the most recent conference call with investors, Dassault Systèmes CEO Bernard Charles announced the acquisition of Netvibes, a Silicon Valley company which publishes a cloud-based brand management service. It provides information specified through custom dashboards. The idea is that Netvibes provides a window on all the content swirling through the Internet about your company and lets you monitor social networking comments, community bulletin boards, web pages, etc.

Netvibes provides a start page dedicated to the chatter about your company. When first started it looks much like an iGoogle page or perhaps MyYahoo. The user can tailor the start page to any specified subjects. Dassault says it will add the Netvibes dashboard to Dassault’s 3D Experience toolset.

The company offers a free basic tool, a low cost VIP version and a premium version, which is where the serious work of targeted analytic tracking and collaborating will happen. It is priced at an enterprise-sized $499 per month.

Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini will come on board with Dassault, which pledges to maintain the existing Netvibes style. The plan is to expand the Enterprise and Premium versions to further support Dassault’s largest customers. They list L’Oreal, Digitas, McCann Worldgroup, Sage, and the US Department of Energy among existing Netvibes customers. Dassault says Netvibes was profitable and not for sale before Dassault came calling, but they immediately saw the advantages of teaming up.

Netvibes 1 — A Netvibes page quickly put together for this story. Once a page is assembled , the user can publish it and then track responses. Real analytics require the more expensive versions—just the thing for marketers and probably a bargain at that, but for small businesses hoping they’re getting it right, Netvibes seems out of reach. (Source: JPR)

Another piece of the grand vision

As a tool, Netvibes fits right into Dassault’s grand vision. It gives the company insight and access to the little people and it broadens the company’s reach with services for marketers and advertisers. The analytic tools look like a good complement to Dassault’s collaboration tools. I’m eager to see what Dassault does with this. And, speaking for the little people, I should say that once I got Netvibes set up and I started poking around my results, I found several story ideas to pursue.