According to Dimitri Dagot, head of the Master of Information Technology at Ecole Centrale Paris, a very prominent school of engineering I’m currently studying at, the two best French software development teams are Dassault Systèmes and Business Objects.
Amadeus and Microsoft also appeared in the conversation to be probably at least as good. But these are not 100% French. Amadeus is trans-European and headquartered in Madrid (with software development teams in Sophia-Antipolis, on the French Riviera), and Microsoft sends after some incubation time its top programmers to Redmond, next to Seattle.
The overall level of French software development teams is excellent, 99% of the software industry players sticking to local engineers rather than outsourcing abroad. As a proof, Indian IT consultancies Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Cognizant Technology Solutions & InfoSys have recently been opening French branches.
Dimitri Dagot could have added ILOG, an excellent R&D team in the very techie world of rules engines among other things. A company that makes >$125m, has an international management team, and several 100s of devs.
Comment by Olivier Ezratty — October 2, 2006 @ 19:34
Dimitri had actually mentioned ILOG in the discussion, but I wanted to keep this post simple. I’m glad you mention ILOG, a great company indeed: at least, it shows there’s some kind of consensus around this sensitive topic, and it reveals professors from the Information Technology Master at Ecole Centrale Paris think consistently
Thank you for your very valuable input.
On software development teams, I tend to believe that considering the number of ex-Microsoftees starting up companies (you mention it in a topic on your blog) the ranking should evolve quickly. For instance, I would bet Serensia, a software company founded by the ex-technical executive director of Business Objects, will reach the top teams in reputation as soon as they get the necessary financing to scale up and hire more and more top people.
Comment by Jeremy Fain — October 4, 2006 @ 02:01
[...] Mind the Gap! Take a deep breath and then look at the gap between the two French leading software publishers Dassault Systèmes and Business Objects (making more than 90% of their revenues outside France by the way) and their challengers. [...]
Pingback by Truffle 100’s French software publishers ranking: Mind the Gap! « “Tech IT Easy” - Jeremy Fain’s Blog — November 28, 2006 @ 01:02