Measuring: How much is that customer costing you?

Feb 12, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the second in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. In the last post, we covered using overall market data to measure success. This post discusses the cost of acquiring and keeping customers....

Dassault Systèmes Q4: slow recovery

Feb 11, 2010 | Hot Topics

Dassault Systèmes’ earnings call is in an hour, so this is all gleaned from the materials released earlier today. Much more color commentary coming later:For Q4, • total revenue was €339.0 million, down 11% as reported from a year ago, but up 16% from Q3. For the sake...

Mentor Graphics trying to make a splash with CFD

Jan 26, 2010 | Hot Topics

Mentor Graphics bought boutique CFD house Flomerics in 2008 to strengthen its offerings in the printed circuit board (PCB) and accelerate its entrance into markets outside the traditional (and volatile) electronics space. Before it became Mentor Graphics’ Mechanical...

Autodesk tucking in

Jan 11, 2010 | Hot Topics

I missed it at the time, so perhaps you did too: Back in December, it was announced that Autodesk had acquired PlanPlatform (also known as Visual Tao) for about $25 million, according to the Haaretz (Israeli) newspaper. PlanPlatform was formed in 2007 by former...

Intergraph acquires COADE

Jan 6, 2010 | Hot Topics

Huge news: Intergraph, a supplier of high-end plant design and data management tools, announced today that it had acquired COADE, a privately-held supplier of AutoCAD-based plant design and stress analysis tools. Terms of the deal were not disclosed; the COADE team...

ESI reports Q3 sales up 3% on strong growth in services

Dec 15, 2009 | Hot Topics

ESI Group reported reasonably good results for the third quarter today, as total revenue grew 3.2% to €13.8 million in what is typically the company’s weakest quarter. License revenue declined almost 6% to €8.5 million when compared to a year ago, slowing the steep...

Q3: So, how did we do?

Nov 18, 2009 | Hot Topics

It’s always hard to create context around companies whose businesses, and business models, are so different but we can draw a couple of conclusions now that Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes and PTC have reported for the summer quarter: • Starting at the top: all three...

Autodesk rev flattening out, license up seq

Nov 17, 2009 | Hot Topics

Autodesk reported surprisingly solid results today, as FQ3 was the first quarter in 5 that showed sequential stabilizing in almost all categories of business, the exceptions being Asia Pac and Manufacturing. The outlook is improving too, as the company gave a modest...

ANSYS Q3: Short-term caution, long-term optimism?

Nov 9, 2009 | Hot Topics

By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen ANSYS’ Q3 results. To quickly recap, revenue was $128.2 million, up 5% from a year ago and at the high end of guidance — but disappointing nonetheless as organic revenue (without Ansoft) fell 5.5% and total software license...

WSJ: Jittery Companies Stash Cash

Nov 3, 2009 | Hot Topics

The Wall Street Journal had a great article yesterday on the apparent hoarding of cash by America’s public companies. According to the piece, “in the second quarter, the 500 largest nonfinancial U.S. firms, by total assets, held about $994 billion in cash and short...