AVEVA strengthens its board
AVEVA Group today announced the appointment of Hervé Couturier as a Non-Executive Director, replacing the retiring David Mann on its board of directors.M. Couturier is a software industry veteran and is currently Executive Vice President of the Technology Group at...
CD-adapco: strong growth seeding the cloud
CD-adapco announced at its London user event that it was growing very nicely in spite of a global recession, has a succession plan in place and is adding additional licensing options to its StarCCM+ offering.Steve MacDonald, President and co-founder of CD-adapco, has...
Done deal: DS now owns IBM PLM
Dassault Systèmes announced today that it has completed its acquisition of IBM’s PLM sales and support organization has been completed. The $600 million transaction includes customer contracts and related assets and allows DS to present a single “face” to its PLM...
Unrest at Avatech
You may recall that Avatech Solutions, like many companies in the engineering software space, had a difficult 2008/2009 in response to the economic realities faced by its government, AEC and manufacturing customers. The company rebounded a bit in its last reported...
Delcam optimistic about 2010
Delcam plc, a UK-based developer of CAM solutions, reported on Monday that revenue for 2009 declined 3% to £31.8 million but, as the company points out “still represented the second-best turnover in the company’s history and stood 7% higher than sales in 2007”. Delcam...
News bites
Lots of things come over the transom that I find very interesting but don’t have time to do much about. But they’re too cool to keep to myself, so ... CFD on a Mac Sympscape (aka Caedium) was mentioned in this blog a while back for making CFD results available via...
PLM vendors have some success helping displaced workers
Over the last year I’ve written a number of posts about vendors offering free or low-cost software and training to laid-off engineers and designers to help them better position themselves for the job market. How has that worked and how many people were actually...
VC funds trickling back into PLM
Comet Solutions back in January announced that it had closed on a $2 million series B round of investment led by Athenian Venture Partners together with Tri-State Growth Capital Fund and Kentucky Co-Investment Partners. The company will use the funds to expand its...
It costs too much to grow?
Autodesk UK recently announced the results of a survey of “more than 100 senior decision-makers, primarily working for mainstream manufacturing companies in the UK” that highlighted a problem I thought we had long overcome: the impression that design solutions are...
Mentor Graphics acquires Valor
Taking a page from the PLM playbook, Mentor Graphics announced on March 18 that it had acquired Valor Computerized Systems, extending its reach from design into manufacturability. The net price paid was about $50 million. Valor did not report revenue for the fourth...
Measuring: You really do get what you measure
This is the last in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. The last few articles in this series have covered metrics that I believe are important in running a business but, of course, in order to analyze...
ESI Group sales up 7% for 2009
ESI Group reported results yesterday for the year ended January 31 -- and investors like. A lot. ESI’s share price is up over 7% at mid-day trading in Paris. The details: • Total revenue for the year was €75.1 million, up 7.1% as reported or nearly 4% in constant...
The real impact of the 2009 debacle
I’m updating market models for 2010 and beyond and got to wondering: How long will it take the PLM vendor group to return to 2007, pre-recession, revenue levels? (Comparisons with 2008 are easier but won’t work, since many of the vendors started feeling the slowdown...
Webinars 103: Is anybody listening?
I’ve been blogging a lot about webinars and for good reason: they are an effective way to get the message out to an interested audience at a very user-friendly cost. But what happens if no one shows up? As so often happens, the conversation started about something...
MSC 2010: The company revamps
MSC Software has quietly been remaking itself: New owner, new leadership, new public face on its website and in webinars. Over the last few weeks, the wrappers have started to come off, as the company has quietly been releasing the 2010 versions of it major products...
Smaller vendors matter too
We get so caught up in the earnings releases of the major PLM vendors that we forget that other companies in the PLM universe also release information, much of it more closely tied to specific geographies or subsegments. Their results help round out the picture of the...
Solvers and sunscreen
This is the third in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. The last post discussed the fact that the cost for keeping a specific customer may be higher than expected and may even exceed the revenue...
ANSYS Q4 beats but more cautious about 2010
ANSYS reported mixed results today: on the one hand, the company reported Q4 revenue of $150.4 million, handily beating the projected $136 million to $142 million and sweeping it to a 2009 revenue total of $517 million, up 8%. It should be noted that this includes...
Is it all good news?
A couple of people have emailed about yesterday’s posts on Autodesk’s Q4 results, asking if there were any negative aspects to the earnings data released. That’s a fair question since I focused on the bright spots in what really was a dismal year for the engineering...
Autodesk “focusing on things we can control”
Autodesk offered more information during its Q4 earnings call, the most startling of which was that it closed 22 deals over $1 million in Q4 -- a staggering 3x the total of the first 9 months added together. A number of these were in AEC and in North America and...
