Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Reader Comments

at 12/18/2007 4:48:03 PM, Paul said:
I think you may have been outmarketed again. The story I heard is that they were unable to raise another round of funding, laid off several people including VP engineering. It sounds like "management buyout" means the original investors washed their hands of it. Not to say that it isn't an important area and maybe they have interesting technology. But it doesn't sound any different from VaST, Virtutech, CoWare etc as opposed to something new for multicore.

at 12/19/2007 9:37:49 AM, Mike Santarini said:
Very astute observations, Paul. I agree, “management buyout” for a startup usually means something went wrong with funding or likely a failure of management to deliver what they promised to the VCs (I like to think it’s more of a case where the company says why give them a cut?—or it may be a case where the VCs are trying to rush a tool to market that’s half baked—a common downfall for startups). We’ll have to see what Imperas delivers. It’s interesting to note that there are a quite a few Virtual Platform folks out there now, including CoWare, Virtio (Synopsys) and VAST. What’s also interesting to note is that Virtio and VAST seem to have carved out application specific niches. Virtio is most noted for its OMAP wins in cell phone architectures and VAST in automotive. A couple of years ago, I wrote a feature on automation in the automotive market. I interviewed a lot of folks in the automotive design arena and basically asked them what level of automation do you use to design a car? The answer was: not much. But pretty much everyone I interviewed at some point asked me “have you heard of this company called VAST?” I was a bit surprised. I, at that point, hadn’t heard much from VAST about VAST but I did from customers. I’m really not sure if CoWare is being used heavier in one application over all others. I have heard however that a majority of CoWare and Virtio business is in building models (it’s a services gig). It would be great to see a VP system that allows users to create models themselves. That’s the part I found most intriguing about Imperas’ pitch, coupled with the fact its management has a pretty good track record for delivering on the hype. But we’ll see.

at 1/23/2008 10:30:35 AM, "Simon says" said:
"laid off several people including VP engineering"... For "several people" read "all except three".

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