Dassault Systèmes has acquired Netvibes, the online dashboard services company that began as a personalized news service before transitioning to becoming a tool for companies to view and manage its brand presence.

Details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Netvivbes builds dashboard intelligence platform for Fortune 500 brands, enterprises and agencies. Customers include Coca Cola, HP and a number of high profile brands. It’s in many ways a widget maker. Thy say they serve a billion Web apps per month and have 250,000 apps in its network. Its core capabilities allow customers to connect internal enterprise systems such as Salesforce.com and ERP environments in as Web oriented architecture. It then applies social analytics across a customer’s systems for use in business intelligence.

Dassault Systèmes is a French technology giant that develops 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions that support industrial processes and provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance to recycling.

The two companies see the potential to marry Netvibes Web experience and social analytics with the need to collect data and make sense of all aspects of industrial processes by providing a social view of the people in and outside the company that participate in the processes.

From the press release:

Dassault Systèmes enables companies to experience the world, from parts to products (e.g. planes, medical devices, buildings), from individual workers to supply chain and distribution (e.g. stores), from designing to experiencing usage scenarios. Netvibes specializes in understanding the Web in new ways, to reveal customer sentiment, brand identity and emerging influencers. Together, Netvibes contributes to Dassault Systèmes’ vision to Experience Everything in the world and on the Web.

The news is noteworthy. Netvibes emerged as a consumer oriented company that allowed its users to create personalized pages. It served as a next generation “MyYahoo,” page where you could aggregate feeds from multiple news sources. The service grew well and for a time enjoyed the spotlight as one of the luminaries of the nascent Web 2.0 world. Many a social media hound used Netvibes to provide fast glimpses of the breaking news of the day.

But it never really found its groove in the consumer space as a breakout service. Facebook emerged after Netvibes became established and quickly grew by aggregating social data from individuals that it then transformed into a social graph. With other services such as Twitter, Facebook emerged as a social network that used real-time updates to give people a reflective view of the world with their new found friends.

Netvibes though proved smart enough. The company turned its technology into a dashboard for companies to monitor the social activity of its brands. It built upon its success and understanding of communities and how they interact to create a compelling service.

Services Angle

This is a story about transformation. The new service providers that come from a consumer oriented market have some advantage when competing in the enterprise. They come unencumbered but more importantly they have a sense of how to provide needed data in a real-time manner in a Web oriented environment. Smart move by Dassaut. Netvibes provides a modern way to bring relevance to established processes that need new ways to remain relevant.