MSC is revving up

I recently spoke with Dominic Gallello, CEO of MSC Software, and John Janevic, VP Strategic Operations, and came away impressed with their plans for revitalizing MSC and its products.  Mr. Gallello took over just about a year ago and has spent much of that time traveling the globe to speak with MSC customers, prospects and employees.  He’s come to the conclusion that MSC has been resting on its laurels for the last several years and needs to invest in Nastran, Adams and the other core analysis products its customers rely on, establish relationships with suppliers of technology that MSC doesn’t offer (such as CFD) and broaden its sales reach — all of which are planned for the next few years. Perhaps the biggest challenge for a new CEO is making over an entrenched organization. Mr. Gallello comes from the CAD world, where more frequent product releases are the norm.  Rather than one release every year to 18 months, MSC will do two releases for each major brand per year, a pace that requires many process changes within MSC as well as planning for 6 releases out.  I was not briefed on any detailed product plans but what I was able to glean sounds promising:  MSC’s products are uneven in their competitive positions, but Mr. Gallello’s aim is for parity in most areas by the end of 2011 and leadership in a subset of those in 2012. MSC’s ambitious product strategy revolves around changing the typical engineering process from serial (CAD – pre – solve – post) to a more interactive, parallel process that aims to reduce cycle time by 90%.  Mr. Gallello sees five main areas where MSC needs to lead the pack: 1. SimX – Mr. Gallello is pitching SimX as a “GUI for tomorrow’s needs” that will feature CAD integration and use virtual topology to clean up geometry and simplify operations such as mid-surface extractions. His goal for 2012 is to support a 200 million element reference model with 100,000 computational parts. 2. Solvers (Nastran, Adams and Marc) – a critical product set where MSC needs to reassert its leadership. MSC recognizes that one solver will never be sufficient for all needs, so is embarking on a program to integrate solver environments.  The first such integration was demonstrated in August, with the announcement that MSC was teaming with ACUSIM Software to directly couple AcuSolve with MD Nastran for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations via MSC’s OpenFSI Interface. 3. SimManager – a solution set Mr Gallello believes will differentiate MSC from its competitors via integration with industry solutions and by building out solutions for specific customers types within automotive, aerospace and MSC’s other target vertical. 4. High Performance Computing (HPC) and 5.  Applications that address its target automotive, aerospace and manufacturing customers. A new and welcome focus is partnering, Mr. Janevic’s domain. MSC finally seems to get that it can’t do everything alone and is building relationships with partners of many types: sales channels, integrators, application technologies.  MSC has typically reported that about 20% of revenue comes from channel partners — quite good when one considers that MSC hasn’t really had any channel-friendly products.  MD Nastran Desktop, announced last week, is specifically intended to drive channel growth for MSC and expand its brand into new, smaller accounts.  Over the next three years, Mr. Gallello wants to grow a channel that represents 30% of total revenue, with a mix of larger system integrators and boutique resellers. The company’s new tagline is “Simulating Reality, Delivering Certainty”.  The plans I heard articulated by Mr. Gallello certainly touched on MSC’s plans for its simulation products. “Delivering certainty” has two interpretations:  Will simulation deliver results that replace physical tests? and, Will MSC make good on its plans, creating certainty in customers’ minds that it can deliver leading-edge products?  It’s early days but MD Nastran Desktop is a good example of what I think we can expect from the new MSC: solid technology, intelligently packaged and priced, designed to engage with both existing and new users to broaden MSC’s appeal.