Mentor: great results, takeover speculation

Mar 2, 2011 | Hot Topics

In the flurry of earnings releases last week came the following from Mentor Graphics: For the full year that ended on January 31, 2011 Mentor reported revenue of $915 million, up 14%, and for the fiscal fourth quarter, the company reported revenue of $307 million, up...

Notes from an MSC MD workshop

Jan 3, 2011 | Hot Topics

Happy New Year! 2011 is already shaping up to be an interesting year, so I hope you took a few days off to rest up … Just before the holiday break, I attended an all-day MD Nastran workshop put on by MSC Software in suburban Boston. We began the day with a quick...

MSC is revving up

Sep 22, 2010 | Hot Topics

I recently spoke with Dominic Gallello, CEO of MSC Software, and John Janevic, VP Strategic Operations, and came away impressed with their plans for revitalizing MSC and its products.  Mr. Gallello took over just about a year ago and has spent much of that time...

News bits

Aug 21, 2010 | Hot Topics

Sorry, guys — it’s been crazy. There’s a lot going on the in the greater PLM universe and I wish I had time to offer a cogent analysis each happening, but I don’t. Rather than leave you hanging, here are several of the things I found most compelling last week:...

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...

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...

CAE to rebound in 2010, up 8%

Jan 13, 2010 | Hot Topics

Forrester Research yesterday gave a rosy forecast for tech spending in 2010, saying in a press release that “global IT spending, which dropped 8.9 percent last year, will rise 8.1 percent in 2010 to more than $1.6 trillion.” Forrester sees spending on computer...

Hmm … CFD results via Twitter

Dec 9, 2009 | Hot Topics

Every so often, someone comes along and does something I honestly would not have thought of: Symscape, a UK CAE vendor, announced recently that release 2.0.1 of its Caedium product includes “the world’s first automated simulation telemetry system for posting...