RSS dashboard company Netvibes acquired by Dassault Systèmes

Netvibes, the San Francisco-based company that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS and social media feed dashboards, announced Wednesday evening it has been acquired by French enterprise software firm Dassault Systèmes. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini

The deal makes sense on a few levels, as Netvibes’ engineering team is based in France (CEO Freddy Mini splits his time between France and California.) The company has also been around for a while — since 2005 — and in that time has grown from being a personal RSS feed dashboard to a profitable enterprise web analytics service. Even though there have been a few management changes and strategy pivots along the way, Netvibes’ tenacity and very smart shift toward enterprise products surely helped position it as an attractive acquisition candidate.

As far as the near future goes, it seems that many things for Netvibes will remain the same. A rep for the company said in an email:

“Our brand, business, products and team all stay. Our free product will remain free and available to our millions of users. What will change is that Netvibes can innovate even faster.”

At the same time, Dassault, which is best known for making 3D computer aided design and project lifecycle management software used by large corporations for industrial projects (Boeing uses Dassault tools to design its jets, for example) seems on the surface like a fairly unexpected match for a social web focused company like Netvibes. It’ll be interesting to see how Netvibes tools are integrated into Dassault’s product lineup in the longer run.

Feature image of Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini courtesy of Flickr user snackfight.

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