The conquest of a global market by a serial entrepreneur : the search for information in the company

Having been chairman of the software publisher Arisem, a start- up company which later became a subsidiary of Thales, Jean Ferré orchestrated an LMBO (Leverage Management Buy Out) of the semantic search engine Sinequa in 2004. He repositioned this technological treasure (two hundred man-years of R&D) into the market of corporate software information access based on a strategy of global distribution. Sinequa’s experience illustrates the importance of partnerships, (Sinequa is sponsored by Microsoft and works with Thales on the InfoM@gic project concerning technologies for research and analysis of multimedia information), professional communities, centres of competition, (involvement in the Cap Digital centre), and finally, the role of the clients of brokers, innovation programmes and capital risk in France.