CDNLive! conferences give Cadence technology users around the world an opportunity to exchange ideas with their peers as well as with Cadence technologists. However, the current global financial environment is impacting everyone in the electronics industry, including many of our customers. Fewer resources are available to dedicate to critical projects. And travel budgets are limited.

To better accommodate our customers, who have expressed concerns over their ability to travel and take time away from their desks, we have decided to host this year’s CDNLive! Silicon Valley event as a series of webinars. These webinars will be an excellent opportunity for users to share their work and present their papers to an even larger audience—and a wider range of their peers—than what was anticipated at the face-to-face conference.

Our presence at DAC in San Francisco in July will provide an opportunity to meet face-to-face with customers. And this year’s CDNLive! events in Japan, Taiwan, Israel, and India will proceed as planned. We feel the decision to deliver this year’s CDNLive! Silicon Valley as a series of webinars is the right way to help our customers achieve productivity, predictability, and reliability.

Further details on the Webinar Series schedule will be posted as available.

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.