Yahoo and Microsoft strike search deal

Jul 29, 2009 | Hot Topics

Looks like Carol Bartz made the deal many believe she was hired to make: Microsoft and Yahoo today announced a ten-year partnership to take on Google’s dominance of the search market. Under the agreement, each company will maintain its own advertising business and...

PTC Q3 in-line but lowers Q4 outlook

Jul 29, 2009 | Hot Topics

PTC announced last night that Q3 revenue (for the period ended June 30) was $226.2 million, compared to earlier guidance of between $220 million and $230 million, bolstered by a $3 million positive currency trend. The company lowered its revenue guidance for Q4 by...

Making the most of customer advisory panels

Jul 23, 2009 | Hot Topics

MSC Software announced yesterday that it had formed a customer advisory board of eighteen leading companies across the automotive, aerospace, and marine industries to “to discuss, debate, and have open dialogue on industry trends, business & technology drivers,...

The business of PLM: 0% financing?

Jul 22, 2009 | Hot Topics

PTC yesterday reminded everyone on its blast list that its 0% financing offer for Pro/Engineer, Windchill and other products continues right through to the end of its fiscal year, September 30. PTC rightly says that the 0% financing will enable buyers to conserve...

Autodesk grant program for environmental solutions

Jul 22, 2009 | Hot Topics

Autodesk announced a cool program to award software to early-stage, clean technology companies “working to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.” The "Clean Tech Partner Program" aims to award software bundles to 100...

Negotiating maintenance

Jul 21, 2009 | Hot Topics

Bank of America/Merrill Lynch last week published results of a survey of 20 CIOs, highlighting that IT spending is still expected to decline in 2009, just not as steeply as earlier predicted. ML asks CIOs to comment on their spending priorities, budget shifts into and...

5 more reasons the Apollo moon landing was awesome

Jul 20, 2009 | Hot Topics

Wired magazine has a cool feature about the Apollo 11 landing, including one writer’s list of 10 things that made it awesome. Everything on that list reflects the worldview of the time but five other things were omitted and deserve mention – no doubt, left off...

Off-topic, sort of: Apollo 11

Jul 16, 2009 | Hot Topics

So many of us were kids when the Apollo program proved that humans could leave Earth and expand our horizon to worlds unknown. It was exciting to see these heroes — smart, brave and daring — risk everything to explore another world. Of course, as kids, we...

Is the MSC deal a good one?

Jul 14, 2009 | Hot Topics

I don’t usually weigh in on this sort of question — especially since we don’t have the proxy material that details the Board’s decision criteria in selling the company to Symphony Technology Group — but there is so much flying around out there that I’ll...

CAE data management – the breakdowns

Jul 14, 2009 | Hot Topics

CAE data management has become a critical topic for many CAE departments — after all, tying together which CAD models were used as the basis for an analysis, the meshing technique and resulting mesh, the loads and constraints and the resulting data and...