COFES 2010: Clouds, ashes and the future

Apr 20, 2010 | Hot Topics

COFES is always interesting (I’ve only been twice, so “always” is a relative term). Get 200-300 CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM/PLM people together at a resort in the Arizona desert for 3 days. Set up a few ballroom speeches and a lot of informal discussion sessions in the resort’s...

Pricing is an art form

Apr 15, 2010 | Hot Topics

It must be, or why would we all believe that $12.99 is actually a more attractive price than $13.00? In the real world a price must reflect the cost to produce the product (or service) at its expected volume and the value the customer places on the product while...

CD-adapco: strong growth seeding the cloud

Apr 5, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...

Unrest at Avatech

Mar 31, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...

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...

Mentor Graphics acquires Valor

Mar 18, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...

ESI Group sales up 7% for 2009

Mar 16, 2010 | Hot Topics

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

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...

MSC 2010: The company revamps

Mar 9, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...

Solvers and sunscreen

Mar 2, 2010 | Hot Topics

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...