WorldCAD Access

Datamonitor Fingers Infor as Possible PTC Buyer

Market analyst Datamonitor figures Infor might buy up PTC this year, because (1) the PTC share price has fallen 55% from its peak, making the company relatively cheap; and (2) Infor needs a PLM offering to better compete against SAP and Oracle.

The problem, Datamonitor admits, is what to do with PTC's CAD business. One concept is to sell it off to Infor's owner, Golden Gate Capital, who would help fund Infor's purchase of PTC. Problem is, WindChill works well with Pro/E, and splitting the two make little sense.

Infor's revenues are "just" $2.2 billion; PTC's price tag is around $1.1 - $2.8 billion, depending on how the valuation goes. Datamonitor figures it's doable, because Infor previously swallowed up another company for $1.35 billion, with Golden Gate's assistance. Datamonitor just isn't sure how much cash Golden Gate still has laying around.

Source.

PTC: We Heart Pirates

"Pirate away."

PTC has a team dedicated to rooting out unlicensed users of their software in China. 

"We actually don't feel terribly when we find that someone is pirating the software, because we have a very good success rate in terms of converting it to revenue," says Barry Cohen, PTC's exec vp of strategic services and partners.

"Pirate away, because if we can catch you, we can quickly turn these into immediate license sales when they have to come clean with it," adds Cornelius Moses, company cfo.

The strategy sounds a lot like those of Generic Software, who found that bootlegers tended to pay for the next upgrade. Kind of like the shareware try-then-pay concept.

Become a customer, however, and the hammer comes down. Skip one maintenance (subscription) payment, and you have to pay for a whole new software licence (5x the cost) before being allowed back on. Not just converted pirates, but everyone. 

(The comments were made during PTC's Q1 earnings call. More details in next Monday's upFront.eZine.)

PTC Drops Out of Billion Dollar Club

With sales closings taking longer than the commute during a Bostonian snow storm, PTC late last night announced it won't be a member of the CAD world's Billion Dollar Club this year. For it estimated that its revenues this coming year will be a mere $960 million.

(Last October, the company was still expecting to bring in $1.1 billion in revenues for the year.)

The company confirmed its earlier warning that Q1 revenue would drop slightly from a year ago: $240 million Q1 revenue, down from $241 million. Ceo Richard Harrison puts the blame on a 29% decrease in license revenue and stronger US dollar (aka "unfavorable currency impact").

In press release statements, the ceo and cfo use "long-term" a lot:

• We remain very optimistic about the long-term opportunity for PTC.
• We intend to continue to make strategic investments ... over the longer-term.
• Balancing the long-term market opportunity...
• We remain committed to accelerating our organic growth rate ... over the longer-term.

To cut costs, the company is

1. Reducing the rate of hiring.
2. Eliminating 260 jobs (about 5%).
3. Postponing annual merit increases.
4. Reducing travel expenses.  

Source.

Siemens PLM Software Q1

The CAD company formerly known as UGS is buried deep inside the Siemens megacorporation, financially speaking.  Siemens PLM Software is part of Siemens' Industry Automation division -- or IA, in Siemens-speak. All this to say, it's hard for me to determine how PLM Software itself is doing.

The division of which it is a part didn't do well in Q1: revenues were down 5% from the same quarter a year ago, and down 14% from the previous quarter. Profits fell by 39% year-over-year.

Source [pdf].

 

Autodesk Gets More (and More) Notice

Thanks to former ceo Carol Bartz now heading up Yahoo, Autodesk is getting more attention as business writers delve into the history of its Bartzian decade-and-four-tenths. For free!

Fer instance, Kara Swisher of BoomTown reports on an unhappy Yahoo-ee complaining of Bartz's cutting manner: "She is like a buzzsaw..." Wait for it, wait for it...

A little Google, and. Ding!

Ironically, Buzzsaw is an "on-demand collaborative project management solution" offered by Autodesk, the software company that Bartz ruled for 14 years until 2006.

See? It makes sense when you know the code: Latch onto key words spoken by anonymous disaffected Yahoo-ites, and then find the links that relate to her Autodesk past.

In this case, she is like a buzzsaw, because Autodesk has a product named Buzzsaw. Geddit?

Well, it only partly makes sense, since Ms Swisher used quotation marks to indicate she doesn't make sense of on-demand collaborative project management solutions. Come to think of it, I didn't think anyone used this string of buzzwords any more.

Lessee... "Buzzsaw is a Gant cloud" -- that's better!

Less is the New More

Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance of the New York Times report on the cost of technology plummeting in "$200 Laptops Break a Business Model." It reminded me of a cookbook the Mennonites put out 25 years ago, called "More-with-Less Cookbook."

I've noted before that technology is overblown; Office 2007 is unnecessary, except for Microsoft's revenues. Multi-core CPUs do nothing for Web browsing. Cell phones can't do anything more.

Now less-is-more is becoming mainstream in technology, as seen by the overwhelming popularity of netbooks. Less-is-more probably began with Google's spartan home page for its search engine, and then became common in other software, like SketchUp (bought by Google) and Picassa (bought by Google).

(Apple reversed the concept. "Less with more" is where you pay more to get less, such as the $150 difference between Apple's under-featured MP3 player and the over-featured one from SanDisk that my daughter bought.)

The idea of pay-less-for-less is frightening for technology executives, who are ingrained with "more = charge more." Hence irrational statements from executives at Sony, Apple, and Dell expressing doubts about netbooks, and then releasing products with fewer features and higher prices than those from the ASUS, Acer, and Wind. 

Dualing Headlines

CADwire.net had this pair of competing headlines in its daily summary earlier in the week:

• ArchiCAD START Continues to Deliver Breakthrough Price for Building Information Modeling (BIM)

• CADDIT Releases 'Anti-BIM' AEC, MEP AutoCAD Add Ons

To BIM, or to not-BIM. It certainly is a philosophical question. Graphisoft argues in favor, because now...

...architects with tight budgets can deploy a powerful BIM solution they could not previously afford.

So, Graphisoft is intimating that BIM is otherwise expensive. In contrast, CADDIT argues in favor of...

...building design without the overhead involved with Building Information Modeling (commonly known as BIM).

(PS: Speaking of headlines, here's a really pooly constructed one from the National Post: "Ontario law banning smoking when child's in car starts." How about instead, "New Ontario law bans smoking when children in car.")

AutoCAD on a Netbook? Yes.

A fellow CAD teacher at BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology) was impressed with the small size of my brand new LG X110 netbook. He pulled out his own brand new notebook purchase: a monstrous 17" Dell.

And then he gasped when he saw the tiny size of my netbook's power supply, and pulled out the hardcover-book-sized power supply for his Dell. "I thought surely there was a mistake on the Dell Web site when I first saw the size. A power supply can't be that big." But it was.

Does the netbook run AutoCAD, he wondered? (He would be traveling a lot this summer, and didn't want to lug around his Dell.) It does, as I describe over on my Gizmos Grabowski weblog, AutoCAD on a Netbook.

Linking Google Earth with AutoCAD

Scott Sheppard has a well written tutorial on Working with large models and the Google Earth Extension for AutoCAD in his It's Alive in the Lab blog. It turns out that models can be too big to publish to Earth, as described by the blog entry.

His entry also has a link to the user guide that teaches you how to:

• Import Google Earth images into AutoCAD.
• Publish 3D AutoCAD models to Google Earth.
• Drape Google Earth images onto AutoCAD 3D meshes.
• Attach time span information to models.

DoubleCAD XT (nee A/CAD LT) Now Expected in February

Kenneth Wong has a fascinating article over at CADalyst's Web site. In IMSI/Design Reschedules Freeware Launch, he has the details on the:

• Launch date of DoubleCAD XT being delayed until February (from December).
• Reason for the name changing from A/CAD LT.
• Story of Autodesk's attempting to re-register the A/CAD trademark they let lapse 17 years ago.