Dassault to buy health software company Medidata for $5.8 billion to gain access to fast-growing market for clinical trial technology

French technology giant Dassault announced yesterday it’s buying buying health software company Medidata for $5.8 billion to expand its service footprint and gain access to the fast-growing market for clinical trial technology. The acquisition is an all-cash deal worth $5.8 billion.

Founded in 1999 by Glen de Vries, Medidata Solutions offers SaaS-based clinical development solutions addressing the functioning of customers’ clinical trials. The healthtech company help clinical researchers reduce trial cycle times, achieve early visibility to reliable clinical data, and maintain strict fiscal responsibility, Medidata Solutions delivers innovative technology to safety accelerate the process of bringing life-enhancing treatments to market.

“It’s a logical evolution of the scope of what we do,” Bernard Charles, chairman and CEO of Dassault Systemes, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” on Wednesday.

“Life science is going to go through an accelerated digitization of its own processes, basically. That’s the motivation for Dassault Systemes to buy Medidata Solutions,” Charles said.

Medidata’s software is used to help clinics manage their back-office operations and their data, and it provides analytics tools so they can make sense of massive amounts of information. Medical device companies also use it to track the process of their clinical trials.

Just last month, a website called FreeSpeech.com revealed that Medidata upgraded its domain name from mdsol.com to its actual company name Medidata.com. According to FreeSpeech.com citing SEC Filings, Medidata acquired the Medidata.com domain name for USD $600,000 in the first quarter of 2019. According to Archive.org, the domain name used to redirect to Medidata.ch, operated by a Swiss company.