Sep
Bye bye Cadence
Last week it was CDNlive down in San Jose, the Cadence captive conference where they showcase all of their new and exciting technologies and share their roadmaps with their customers. I was there for two days and presented a session on Wednesday afternoon about the application of mutation analysis to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of verification. The session was well attended and by the number and depth of the questions afterwards it was clear that my message was hitting home and they really wanted to see how this could help them improve their existing methodologies. If you want me to perform a similar talk at your company, then please let me know and we can schedule a session – brian_bailey at acm dot org
Afterwards I was talking with a group of Cadence employees. They said that the total cost to put on such a show was significantly less than what they usually had spent on DAC. In addition they did not have to constantly look over their shoulders to see if someone was listening in to their conversations and the quality of the people who attended was so much higher than the leads they got from DAC. One person asked if they thought Cadence would ever go back to DAC. The consensus answer was – I don’t see why we would ever want to return to DAC.
Believe CDNLive was designed at the start - by Casey - to be self-sufficient. So the comparison is not apples to apples. Still, I agree with your conclusion, Brian.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:35 pmThere is always strong value in a user group and communicating privately with your current customers. Not enough EDA vendors do enough to actually have a conversation with their customers. Full points for Cadence in doing so at CDNLive.
A trade show like DAC allows you to interact with prospects–potential new customers. It’s also a bigger draw than a single vendor (or even single vendor ecosystem) show. To the extent that Cadence wants to launch new products that carry them beyond their current customers they will need to do more than CDNLive style events.
Peter Drucker in his 1994 HBR article “The Theory of the Business” offers an example of what happened to the traditional department stores who had high customer satisfaction as they were shrinking: by not talking to any non-customers they missed emerging trends in the market. Clearly Cadence is already shrinking on a revenue basis, I would suspect that avoiding trade shows and other forums that would allow them to interact with non-customers will only allow them to continue to shrink more cost effectively.
September 25th, 2008 at 4:50 pm[...] left a comment on September 25 (I only mention this to be clear that I am not “piling on” after the recent executive [...]
October 21st, 2008 at 3:02 am