News Commentary
PLM - With and Without CAD/CAM/CAE 1/27/2004 - MCADCafe
Dr. Dennis A. Nagy Principal Technology Business Consulting February 18, 2004, 10:37:44 PM The recent announcement by EDS that it has a potential buyer for its UG PLM Division crossed in my mind with the recent article by my old friend Russ Henke and his colleague Jack Horgan entitiled "PLM - with and without CAD/CAM/CAE" The other major CAD-origin PLM vendors have either no reason, no money, or both, to pay $1.8 Billion for UG PLM. Of the 3 "non-CAD/CAM/CAE" PLM players profiled in Russ's article, one (SAP of Walldorf, Germany) is the 600-pound (or is it kg.?) financially healthy gorilla (revenues approaching $10B, EBITDA ~$2.5B) and the other two (MatrixOne and Agile, both U.S.-based companies) are just relatively sick financial fleas. So it seems to me that SAP will buy UGS PLM and with that, three (CATIA, UG, I-DEAS) of the 5 main MCAD systems of the past decade (the other 2 being Pro/E and Autocad) will be in the hands of non-US-based companies. An inadvertant consequence (lost in the noise of the bigger deal) would be that the net result of our FTC's 2-year-long action against MSC.Software to reestablish "competition in the NASTRAN market" (paid for by U.S. taxpayers) causes a German company gets their hands on MSC.NASTRAN source code and expertise (now re-branded as NX NASTRAN by UG PLM) as part of the deal.		Dr. Dennis A. Nagy Principal Technology Business Consulting
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