From its base in the heart of Paris, Nevibes had been first to market with a completely customizable personal home page. When Freddy Mini took over the CEO role at Netvibes from its founder Tariq Krim in 2008, he was painfully aware of the fact that while over a million people still relied on Netvibes' powerful modularity as their personal home page, the slew of well-heeled imitators including Google and Yahoo! would make it impossible for him to build a revenue model without imposing advertising on his users, which he was simply not willing to consider.
Freddy recognized the need to adapt to changing market conditions and with the steadfast support of his team, successfully aimed his product at the enterprise and repositioned it as a universal dashboard allowing businesses to monitor and act upon internal and external data sources in real time. Under Freddy's leadership, Netvibes steadily built a revenue base and assembled an international customer list including the likes of Orange, Coca-Cola, Pages Jaunes, The Department of Energy and Universal McCann .
Last Thursday, Netvibes announced its acquisition by Dassault Systèmes, the world-leading 3D and Product Lifecycle Management software company. The deal will provide Netvibes with an significantly broader platform to spread its mantra of dashboard intelligence to an even greater number of companies and brands, and marks Netvibes' complete transition from Web 2.0 poster-child to enterprise-grade software vendor.
While many would have bowed out of the race in the face of mounting competition and a flawed revenue model, Freddy and his team, led by CFO, Annabelle Malherbe, VP Product Franck Mahon, VP Business EMEA Stéphane Lechere and VP Business Americas Chris Damsen, doubled down on a new vision and drove toward it with dogged persistence.
We applaud their creativity, tenacity and resourcefulness as entrepreneurs and as managers and wish them great success on their next journey as part of the Dassault Systèmes family. We are also delighted to see that a European technology company as large and as established as Dassault has the vision to seek out and integrate a startup as innovative as Netvibes, giving it the means to conquer the world while remaining in France where it will no doubt inspire the next generation of software entrepreneurs to follow in its footsteps and re-mix the web one more time.