A week of travel and jury duty have kept me from posting as much as normal, but here are a couple of things to know about while I work on more substantial write-ups of the Siemens PLM analyst event, Autodesk’s new subscriptions and other big happenings.
Last week, Accelrys announced that it has acquired ChemSW, an environmental health and safety compliance solutions provider. Accelrys currently plays in the fundamental research space, helping companies across the commercial industrial spectrum, but also research labs and other groups, conduct and document their research. Adding ChemSW’s compliance portfolio will help these pharma, chemical, materials and other customers manage and track the source, use and disposal of chemicals as they are used in the lab, scaling up and production. Accelrys announced that it will pay roughly $15 million in cash for ChemSW and an additional $2 million in bonuses if milestones are achieved after the acquisition. Accelrys expects ChemSW to add $1 million to $2 million in revenue for the rest of 2013, so we can guess at total annual revenue of $6ish million.
Today PTC announced that it has acquired long-time partner NetIDEAS, a software hosting provider and PLM technical consulting house. NetIDEAS has been hosting Windchill for PTC since 2000 and, according to the press release, serves “thousands of users worldwide”. This is interesting; according to the FAQ about the deal, PTC plans to enlarge the hosted offering to include “PTC Service Parts Management, PTC Service Parts Pricing [and] PTC FlexPLM” and be “priced based on a per user price” — it’s going to be very useful to have these types of functions accessing data and doing their work in a hosted environment. I’ve reached out to PTC for more info and will update if I learn more.
Finally, listen up CAE peeps. MSC wants you to become an FEA master with a degree from Spain’s UNED online university. UNED isn’t some shady, fly-by-night degree mill; it has over 200,000 students worldwide. This post-graduate training program is in the Finite Element Method and advanced use of commercial CAE software — and comes with a free copy of MSC’s Student edition. In addition, MSC customers get a 10% discount towards the cost of the program. We’ve been talking for a long time about certification for CAE experts; this is certainly one step in proving you know when to tet and when to hex.
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Jury duty. One of those legal documents that starts with dread, proceeds to annoyance and actually turns out to be interesting. But I’m glad to be back in the office.