Today’s blog is a potpourri of various small things, some of which refer back to earlier blogs.
Firstly, you probably saw that Cadence appointed John Bruggeman as CMO. He was previously CMO at Wind River (recently acquired by Intel). I met him several times when I was at Virtutech since we were both in the space of embedded software development. We even persuaded him to come and give an opening speech at our sales kickoff one year.
Prior to Wind River, John was at Mercury Interactive (along with Ken Klein the CEO of Wind River). There he came up with the concept of Business Technology Optimization, or BTO, as an umbrella theme for what they did. At Wind River, he tried to reposition the company as more than just embedded with the mantra of Device Software Optimization or DSO. If you were at the Embedded System Conference any time around then, you couldn’t but notice the ten foot high white “D,” “S” and “O.” So what will it be this time? EDA, boring. Electronic System Optimization, that’s hot. ESO, you read it here first!
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A couple of days after I wrote about mobile payments, Nokia announced Nokia Money targeted at just that space, along with a company Obopay (which is partially owned by Nokia).
And by the way, a pet peeve, Nokia is pronounced with slight emphasis on the first syllable and not with emphasis on the “i” as many people say it. While on that topic, going back to talking about learning Chinese, Beijing (bei=north, jing=capital) is pronounced with a “j” as in “jug” not a sort of harsh “sh”.
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Going back to Japan, I accused the handset makers of being too inwardly focused and competing only with each other. It looks like they are going to solve that problem by merging them. NEC, Hitachi and Casio are looking to merge their handset operations to create the second largest handset vendor in Japan (Sharp, surprisingly, is number one).
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I talked earlier about Apple’s strength with iPhone, not so much in volume but in profit. Apparently Apple had (in 1H09) 1.9% of handset unit volume, 8% of revenue and a whopping 32% (almost a third) of all the profit. The numbers are a little distorted since both Sony-Ericsson and Motorola lost money (so reducing the denominator). If we take them out of the equation, they still have 25% of the profits of the profitable handset vendors.
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Magma came out with surprisingly good results, beating street estimates. Revenue was $28.8M and cash-flow was positive. I recently talked with someone who told me that their synthesis was now better than Cadence or Synopsys but place and route was not (yes, I know that is anecdote and not data). Of course SP&R is a horse race, and there are still too many horses with Synopsys, Cadence, Magma, Mentor/Sierra, Atoptech and others. It is a marathon not a sprint.