Cadence: the picture gets darker

Face it, Eagle is all you need. Professional version is $1494 (one license) for schematic, layout, and auto-routing. Cadence is ancient history.

I know Cadence... They are good at cooking... may be tools or even the revenues.... Cadence should be awarded for maximum number of VPs in the industry.... If they seriously want to improve, they should layoff almost 40% of redundant staff... and st art behaving like a technology company rather then sales company....

Ironically, now is a good time for Cadence to go private. They have some good stuff, there is just a huge mess. Having it rehashed each quarter as a public company hurts them. Take them private, focus on cleaning things up, and 2 years from now go public again.

The suspicion going around Mentor during the takeover attempt was that Cadence had been moving revenue into earlier quarters, and that the Mentor acquisition was an attempt to hide the cooked books in the acquisition write-offs and use some of Mentor's cash to fix the problem. Fortunately, Cadence ran out of time, money, and credibility before that happened.

EDA is dead. Internal development is in. Soon there will be a lot of good engineers to hire. It would be foolish for large chip makers (e.g. Intel, TSMC) or design houses to rely on Cadence, Magma, or even Synopsys for their critical roadmap. Mentor can do OK serving the sickos in the IBM camp. The rest will see their tools replaced by internal tools one after another. This is actually very good for the engineers.

Why in the world would Mentor want to acquire Cadence? The result would be a reverse synergy: the third biggest acquires the second biggest. Together, they become the fifth biggest. I could see Autodesk taking Cadence, especially now that Fister, a former Autodesk board member, is gone.

Now would be a good time for Mentor to do a take-over of Cadence. Rumors abound that the revenue recognition that the company's management has been doing for the past year have been overstated. I would be sweating bullets if I were on the Board of Directors - when the truth is finally disclosed, the question "where was the Board oversight?" will be asked. It comes back to whether one can trust the management of a company.

In times gone by ... such a restatement meant two things: (i) the auditors and tax people were looking for the 'accurate' reflection of the situation, and (ii) the subsequent quarters were so BAAD that the restatement from the earlier quarter made the 'future' actually look better ... after all they can recognize the booking only once. lets say actual bookings were 100-60-50 in sequential quarters, but 25 of the first was for future periods... so 75-70-65 would look a LOT better ... of course by now people are breathing a sigh of relief and forget HOW BAD the first quarter was!

They need to: 1. COme clean on on the accounting 2. Layoff 40% 3. Breakoff PCB 4. Kill FED 5. Invest in ICD and custom 6. Sell DFM clearshape etc.

What would Solomon say today?

Solution: Go ask Uncle Sam for a bailout...

Are we possibly seeing a set up for the acquisition of Cadence next year? Or will there be a break up of the components?

I saw bad news when I read about Cadence trying to take over Mentor. A similar thing happened when Daisy succeeded in forcing a buyout of Cadnetix, a very successful EDA company at the time. The result: Daisy and it's new aquisition Cadnetix were both gone in less then a year. The lesson: Technical people do not like being bullied around and Cadence should have known better then trying to show muscle like this.

So when do they start asking the dearly departed to return part or all of the obscene bonuses they previously received if they truely were cooking the books.

This company is dead money. With a 25% layoff pending we may see a rapid fall to #3 in EDA. If they KNOW the results for this quarter and are confident in them, why postpone? And, if they can only make this quarter's numbers by using first quarters $24m, who is fooling who? Are the new guys pulling a fast one or did Team Fister pull the fast one? Post hoc ergo propter hoc for real? Do you really think these two events are not linked? If they are not, then the current team has done just that to use it to raise $24M for this quarter. They are all a bunch of crooks!

Titanic.. Or in Fister's case shall I say Itanic !

Fister-Gate

Enron

Enron