MSC bidding war heats up

Sep 15, 2009 | Hot Topics

MSC Software announced that its board of directors has received revised offers to acquire the company. The original offer of $7.63 per share from Symphony was trumped last week when an unnamed party offered $8.00 per share; under the original agreement between...

Using Xbox 360 to simulate more than games

Sep 15, 2009 | Hot Topics

In the “How cool is this!” pile: According to HPCWire, researchers in the UK used a number of Xbox 360 gaming console chips to build a cheaper parallel processing engine for their research into the predictability of cardiac arrhythmias. The research is described in...

Social media the answer to PLM marketing budgets?

Sep 14, 2009 | Hot Topics

At a time when it is more expensive than ever to rely on traditional marketing outlets like user meetings, mailings, magazine ads and call centers, the perceived “free” nature of online marketing is very appealing. Do PLM/design/engineering/analysis software buyers...

MSC gets another offer

Sep 9, 2009 | Hot Topics

Remember suitor M, described in MSC’s proxy as not having financing available by the end of August? Well, that may have changed. Or it may be a completely new entrant – who knows?MSC just announced that it has received a proposal “superior” to that from Symphony...

HPC explained

Sep 8, 2009 | Hot Topics

I don’t usually promote vendors’ marketing materials, but this one is just too good to pass up. Sun Microsystems and AMD have teamed up to sponsor HPC for Dummies, an ebook in the famous yellow and black Dummies series. You do need to give some contact information and...

Five tips for writing the perfect press release

Sep 8, 2009 | Hot Topics

I see dozens of press releases in a typical week, and most are nothing special. Company A is proud to release product B; company X has selected vendor Y; so-and-so is named to powerful-position-Z. But some releases do stick out, leading to my top tips for writing...

MSC proxy: drama, mystery and 13 suitors

Sep 2, 2009 | Hot Topics

MSC Software has finally filed the proxy statement for its proposed acquisition by Symphony Technology Group – and it makes interesting reading. At the very least, it explains why it took so long to get the proxy to the SEC.First, a proxy statement is a document...

The potential for CAE: 10 million licenses?

Aug 27, 2009 | Hot Topics

One of the questions I am most frequently asked is the rate of CAE penetration: how many possible users are there for CAE applications? How many of these are actually using CAE today? How is this likely to grow? Investors ask because they don’t necessarily understand...

Are you thinking about cloud computing?

Aug 26, 2009 | Hot Topics

Cloud computing is still a very ill-defined concept, with definitions that vary by user industry and from IT vendor to vendor. But most agree that cloud computing provides access to IT resources that are outside the traditional data center, in a shared resource across...

All about you and you and you …

Aug 21, 2009 | Hot Topics

I started Schnitger Corp. a little over a year ago, and I must say it’s gone very well. Thank you! But this post is about you, the people who read this blog. My hosting provider makes available a pile of statistics from which I’ve distilled the following • in the last...