Silver & gold: Autodesk’s new channel program

Apr 26, 2010 | Hot Topics

Autodesk recently announced a number of changes to its channel partner program, designed to make Autodesk easier to do business with and to give Autodesk’s 1900 VARs a competitive edge in the marketplace. Since Autodesk gets around 85% of revenue from the reseller...

COFES 2010: Mike Payne responds

Apr 22, 2010 | Hot Topics

A few days ago, I posted a few thoughts about this year’s COFES, including my take on a brief presentation given by Mike Payne. Mike graciously responded and below is his email in its entirety. He makes a number of good points: Monica, I had condensed the talk down to...

FIRST Robotics finals start tomorrow

Apr 14, 2010 | Hot Topics

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may remember that I absolutely gushed back in February when a FIRST Robotics Competition team spoke to the analysts and media assembled by PTC. A quick recap: a small group of high schoolers (and their adult mentors) rolled in a...

SpaceClaim closes VC funding

Apr 13, 2010 | Hot Topics

As I noted a few weeks ago, venture funding has started to come back into the engineering software space. SpaceClaim today announced that it has closed a new round of funding to the tune of $5 million. The funding came from current investors, including Borealis...

Autodesk expands assistance program to veterans

Apr 12, 2010 | Hot Topics

Autodesk has extended its Assistance Program to veterans, according to the Wounded Artist Project. The Project contacted Autodesk to garner its support for a YouTube video on, of all things, BIM (Building Information Management); Autodesk was so impressed that it...

News bites

Mar 29, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...
The real impact of the 2009 debacle

The real impact of the 2009 debacle

Mar 15, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...

Smaller vendors matter too

Mar 4, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...

Is it all good news?

Feb 24, 2010 | Hot Topics

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”

Feb 23, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...