Yesterday was an interesting day in the enterprise search space. Autonomy bought the information governance business of Computer Associates which provides records management and email management software and services. The terms were not disclosed. I leave it to others to analyse the impact of this acquisition and move on to the acquistion of Exalead by Dassault Systemes, which provides product life-cycle management and CAD software. Only a month ago there was an annoucement that Dassault would be integrating the Exalead search software into Dassault products, so why was that deal closed and then a few weeks later the acquistion takes place?

No great sums of money were involved, with Exalead being valued at around $200M. Dassault's revenues are in the $2Billion range. It is quite easy to see the potential benefits of the deal from Exalead's viewpoint in terms of more funding for research and development (and search needs a lot of R and D!) and a global sales force. Clients will be reassured by seeing Exalead being backed by a major corporate player with significant, if highly specialised, expertise in enterprise software. It is rather like the FAST Search/Microsoft scenario, but therein also lies the danger. When FAST Search was a stand-alone business I could always count on my contacts being able to provide a rapid response to queries about the software. Now it is almost impossible to find anyone in the UK to talk to, and I am reduced to working through a call-centre to track down someone, who rarely fully understands the product. It does not make me feel inclined to add FAST Search to a short list for my clients to consider.

Exalead faces the challenges that any small, dynamic and specialised business faces when acquired by a much larger company. How quickly will Exalead employees adapt to the management and operational culture of Dassault, and how quickly will the Dassault sales teams be able to get up to speed on the Exalead product? The CEO of Sinequa has blogged some interesting comments. The search business is growing rapidly, and the prospects for Exalead are very good. I do hope that Dassault takes a sensible approach to supporting its new acquistion, and does not end up strangling it.

Martin White