Cadence Services Formally Addressing the SaaS Model
June 30th, 2009 by adminThe service business at Cadence has been steadily operating at over a $100M/yr run rate. Their services group has been in place performing tactical design for clients (chips and IP), tactical CAD support file and technology file/application program file creation and flow/methodology creation. This projects and billings for the group have been organized for milestone based funding releases. The current economy has forced a changed in this model as a rolling cash flow and time based releases have become a big issue for most clients and for the service group’s revenue recognition. This change has driven the Cadence services group to add a SaaS (Software as a Service) model to their offering. The offering and the technology has been developed and deployed on a selective basis for the past 8 years and currently supports a less than 100 clients.
Cadence’s solutions offerings are split into five areas: Systems, Enterprise Verification, Low Power, Mixed Signal and Advanced Nodes. Their SaaS offering is focused on the tactical services offerings that can use defined and stable manufacturing flows and tools - these are Enterprise Verification, Low Power and Mixed Signal. These three areas are being addressed with a service offering that includes an IT configuration (both client and supplier sides), training for both products and design applications, an engineering/task based outsourcing and the design environment/flow. This offering is being brought out as a business unit based on recent survey results showing on a typical design project, 17% of the budget was EDA Tool cost, and 23% was time and resources to develop and implement the production environment and flow PER DESIGN.
The model that is being used is that of a traditional ISV scenario. The service offering is presenting not a pure play SaaS model where the software is just placed in a cloud to achieve higher availability, rather is is an integrated hardware, software and service offering following the model and techniques of ISV leader Oracle. The Cadence solution uses for following mapping of the Oracle SaaS stack model:
* Access and management : Environment management interface and Remote user desktop
* User interface : End-to-end use model(s) [flows, methodologies, best practices, etc]
* Integrated Software : Cadence products and solutions
* Database : Design database storage
* IT Infrastructure : Secure Networking and High performance compute resources
In the new solution the Customer Site only needs to host the design team, a small IT staff and the Cadence remote desktop connected through a VPN. The Cadence side of the VPN is a hub that consists of Managed design and IT services, compute resources, the design database and packaged design environment with software access. These hubs are located in 11 location world wide to insure data transfer and access availablity. These 11 sites are also high availability compute centers with downtimes ranging from 28hrs/year (99.671% avail) to 0.4hrs/year (99.995% avail).
The SaaS programs are project solution based, not tool availability solution based. This is not simply purchase access to X number of simulation runs or a bag of tokens that can be used on more than one tool in a product family. The basis is the leveraging of a standardized design environment (naming conventions, scripting, tool sequence, netlist formats, BIST procedure, etc) for a given foundry/process selection. The use of these standardized environments can lead to schedule improvements of start of design for a full design team in 1 week vs prior project 3 months. This improvement was obtained by a new medical device manufacturer.
The SaaS model is an service level agreement, so levels of support, mutual resource allocation, length of data retention, data recovery and backup and IP access/compatibility with the flow are all areas of contract negotiation for the projects. This offering is available now from Cadence.
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