Briefings: June 2006
Industry News, Reports, and Items of Interest
Latest News
May 1, 2006
By DE Editors
SGI Files for Bankruptcy Protection
Silicon Graphics (SGI) filed for bankruptcy protection in an effort to cut $250 million of debt while giving big-note holders a majority stake in the business. SGI’s non-U.S. subsidiaries were not included in the filing. The filing occurred just before DE went to press.
According to a press release on the proceeding, the plan is to simplify SGI’s capital structure and emerge from Chapter 11 within six months. Part of the plan, which has yet to be approved by the bankruptcy court, has major holders of SGI’s Senior Secured notes loaning the company $70 million to be combined with cash on hand to help pay down existing debt.
Current shares of common stock will be cancelled and equity holders of shares will get nothing. Senior Secured bondholders, however, will probably be issued new common stock and have “the opportunity to purchase $50 million of additional new equity…. It is contemplated that the $50 million of new capital will be used to reduce debt and further enhance the company’s liquidity.”
Published reports say SGI listed $397 million in assets and $650 million of debt in court. “We want to assure our customers, our employees, and our communities that SGI is operating business as usual,” said recently appointed Chairman and CEO Dennis P. McKenna in an SGI statement. “Our customers can continue to rely on SGI for its mission-critical products, services, and support.”
The company says the reorganization should not disrupt day-to-day operations as the company works on regaining market share. In its press release, SGI says that over the last 100 days under its new management team it has closed on some significant sales orders reflecting continued customer confidence; completed a program that has resulted in $100 million in savings with an additional $50 million in savings underway; identified “additional paths” to streamline operating and administrative costs; improved the efficiency of its manufacturing operations; and implemented a plan to reposition its product and market focus.
SGI, which has 1,800 employees, must now convince customers it will continue to offer the high-end computing systems and graphics capabilities they have come to be associated with while generating cash flow. Analysts have said a focus on high-end systems in face of competition from continually improving cheaper computers led to trouble. No layoffs were part of the bankruptcy filing.
“We regret the effect that this will have on SGI’s shareholders and other unsecured creditors.” McKenna concluded. “SGI plays a critical role in the world’s infrastructure. This needs to be preserved.”
SGI
Mountain View, CA
PTC announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Mathsoft Engineering & Education, the maker of the Mathcad engineering calculation tool for $63.25 million in cash. According to a press statement, the acquisition closed in early May, after regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions were resolved satisfactorily.
With this acquisition, PTC says, it will expand its MCAD/CAM/CAE solutions with predictive engineering capabilities that will help users deliver optimized products sooner with higher quality and improved knowledge capture.
“Mathsoft will be an important addition to PTC, as it will expand both our product offering and our addressable market,” said C. Richard Harrison, president and chief executive officer of PTC in a statement issued with the announcement.
According to the press statement, once the acquisition closes, users will to be able to leverage Mathcad as a stand-alone solution or as an integrated part of PTC’s Product Development System. Calculations authored and documented in Mathcad can predict critical parameters that will drive Pro/Engineer designs, and Pro/Engineer parameters can be fed into Mathcad to perform supplementary engineering calculations. The integration extends through Pro/Engineer Mechanica, and XML-based documents from Mathcad can be managed, cross-referenced, configuration controlled and reused in PTC’s Windchill as well as assembled and published with Arbortext.
Mathsoft has 130 employees in seven countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. The transaction has been approved by the requisite vote of Mathsoft shareholders.
Mathsoft
Cambridge, MA
PTC
Needham, MA
Cyco Software, a supplier of engineering data management (EDM) solutions, announced full support for AutoCAD 2007 design software from Autodesk. Cyco Software’s flagship AutoManager products and related industry-focused business applications now support immediate deployment of both existing and new AutoCAD data and other technical documentation. The company says its support of AutoCAD is enterprise-wide and intended to streamline operations, reduce errors, and aid decision-making.
According to a press release announcing the support, AutoCAD 2007 helps customers maintain a competitive advantage with a focus on conceptual design and visualization tools. Cyco Software provides technology, integration, applications, and services to help organizations leverage engineering information throughout the enterprise. Cyco Software solutions include applications for discrete and process manufacturing, and the energy, oil & gas, chemical, government, and pharmaceutical industries.
For additional information, visit Autodesk or Cyco.
Autodesk
San Rafael, CA
Cyco Software
Atlanta, GA
Paul Muir’s on a mission to educate manufacturing and process engineering managers throughout industry of the efficacy of intellectual work management or IWM. Muir is the CEO of McLaren Software, which specializes in applications for engineering process and content management. Muir talked about IWM by phone recently, describing how Enterprise Engineer (EE) 3.5 makes it easy for company executives and others to keep track of engineering operations and centralize control of all key business processes.
As Muir delved into the possibilities of his company’s new release in his bracing Scottish burr it occurred that Enterprise Engineer 3.5 seemed to be an enterprise content management program designed to be easy to deploy and fully accessible right out of the box.
“We can get customers live in weeks instead of months or years,” he said. And, according to Muir, unlike a host of ECM solutions, which can often cost users large sums of money in services, Enterprise Engineer’s services costs have been averaging about half its initial cost.
Marking the difference between workflow and lifecycle, Muir made it a point to explain IWM was also not PLM. Instead, IWM’s concern is with the front end of the product concept process, giving PLM the ability to take over once a project gets the green light.
Enterprise Engineer extends document-centric capabilities by using work-management functions to give decision makers the ability to centrally manage drawings, data sheets, correspondence, calculations, financial projections, and essentially all unstructured content. Version 3.5 pulls it all together, said Muir, in an auditable, process-based way. It gets enterprises to focus on the processes around creating and using critical intellectual property and automates monitoring, measuring, and managing documents management.
EE is a suite of programs that includes a formal review and approval process so engineers can mark up sections of drawings with interactive comments, ensuring all approvals are recorded with appropriate digital signatures as well as reasons for specific approval. It enables the auditable transmission of controlled documents and drawings both internally and to external organizations, providing trails, multiple notification mechanisms, automatic rendering of transmittal documents, and reporting.
Muir pointed out that EE 3.5 includes a drawing manager that provides direct access to EE functionality from within AutoCAD and an office manager that provides flexible integration with both the EMC Documentum and FileNet P8 platforms as well as full integration with Microsoft Office. Other features include document viewing and redline mark-up in both neutral and native formats and automated content publishing based on business rules and lifecycles.
“As companies begin to rely on a truly global engineering workforce,” said Muir, “the need to control processes and secure intellectual property becomes a major challenge. IWM allows executives … to maintain control of the business processes no matter how widely dispersed the workforce. And these processes are as much a key part of the intellectual capital of the business as the intellectual property itself.”
Enterprise Engineer operates on Windows 2000, XP Pro, and the Windows 2003 server. It includes and installs .Net version 1.1. For more information visit mclarensoftware.com.
—Jonathan Gourlay
McLaren Software
Houston, TX
Investments in Software and Services Shine
According to recent statistics compiled by consulting and research firm CIMdata, Inc., the worldwide product lifecycle management (PLM) market grew 8.7 percent to reach $18.1 billion in 2005. This growth rate exceeded earlier estimates, with the boost attributed to continued strengthening of the global economy and an increased recognition of the value of PLM in improving a company’s business performance. PLM investments are forecast to continue climbing over the next five years, reaching an estimated $26.3 billion by 2010. That represents a compound annual growth rate of approximately 7.7 percent.
CIMdata research describes a PLM industry that is a broad market encompassing investments in many different types of technologies and services. It includes technologies as well as a strategic business approach that supports the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product information from concept to end of life. PLM integrates people, processes, business systems, and information across a company’s departments to its extended enterprise with suppliers and consultants.
CIMdata segments the overall PLM market into two primary subsectors: PLM information authoring and analysis applications (Tools), and collaborative product definition management (cPDm). Historically, the Tools sector has received the largest amount of investment, although growth of that sector has slowed noticeably over recent years.
According to CIMdata, $12.1 billion was spent in 2005 by companies worldwide on PLM Tools such as MCAD, electronic design automation (EDA), simulation and analysis, technical publishing, and others. Growth in this sector was primarily driven by investments in areas such as mid-range MCAD. Areas such as high-end MCAD experienced very low growth. The Tools portion of the PLM market is forecast to grow at 4 percent over the next five years to reach $14.7 billion by 2010.
The fastest-growing sector of PLM is expenditures on cPDm, which is focused on collaboration, management, and sharing of product-related information. This segment covers technologies and approaches such as PDM, collaboration and visualization, data exchange, portfolio management, digital manufacturing, enterprise application integration, workflow, functional applications such as configuration management, and solutions for specific industries or businesses. CIMdata research indicates that the cPDm portion of the PLM market exceeded previous forecasts for growth and reached $6.1 billion in 2005, representing an increase of approximately 14.7 percent over 2004. The cPDm segment is expected to continue its strong growth to $6.8 billion in 2006 and reach $11.6 billion by 2010 for a rate of 13.9 percent.
“Manufacturers of all sizes are continuing to implement PLM in record numbers. Increased levels of investment in both new and expanded PLM solutions affirms that companies clearly recognize PLM as fundamental to improve their top and bottom line performance,” said CIMdata President Ed Miller in a press statement. “More companies are committing to PLM while current users are continuing to expand their PLM solutions.”
According to Miller, PLM investments are fueled by executive-level awareness of the tremendous business value of PLM as an enabler in compressing time to market, reducing cost, improving quality, and achieving product and process innovation. For more information, visit CIMdata.
CIMdata, Inc.
Ann Arbor, MI
Two Desktops and a Pair of Mobiles Comprise Offering
Hewlett-Packard has announced four new workstations for engineering and compute-intensive environments: The HP xw6400 and xw8400 desktop workstations and the HP Compaq nw8440 and nw9440 mobile workstations. Each uses Intel processors.
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| The HP Compaq xw9440 Mobile Workstation |
The 64-bit desktop—desk-side in HP parlance—xw6400 and xw8400 workstations feature dual-core Intel Xeon processors and HP’s toolless chassis design, which facilitates servicing, upgrading, and maintenance. The high-end HP xw8400 can be equipped with a pair of dual-core Xeons, which says HP, means it offers the power for such compute-intensive workouts as engineering, visualization, and oil and gas exploration. According to HP, the HP xw6400 and its 64-bit dual-core Xeon processor are suitable for such environments as manufacturing, digital content creation, and financial services. Additionally, an HP spokesperson told DE that he believes the xw6400 has the smallest footprint of any dual-core system currently available.
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| The HP xw8400 Workstation |
The HP Compaq nw8440 and nw9440 mobile workstations offer workstation power with notebook convenience, says HP. Additionally, the company says that it is working with Microsoft to ensure that both mobile workstations fully support Vista when that OS becomes available later this year. Both workstations, says HP, are compatible with the company’s business notebook accessory solutions.
The HP Compaq nw9440 has NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500M graphics, a 17-inch display, and its Intel Core Duo processors enable you to users to run multiple applications simultaneously. (Intel’s Core Duo processors are designed to handle concurrent applications efficiently.)
The nw9440 measures 1.3 inches and weighs 7.5 pounds. It’s available with either Microsoft Windows XP Professional or FreeDOS operating systems. Features include wired and wireless communications, a portfolio of security tools, and various application certifications.
The 6-pound HP Compaq nw8440 mobile workstation also deploys Intel Core Duo processors. Its screen, which measures 15.4 inches wide, leverages ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 graphics.Its offered with the same operating system choices plus XP Home edition.
Both the HP xw6400 and the xw8400 desktop workstations are available with either XP Professional (32 or 64-bit) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 4 (64-bit) preinstalled. DE was briefed on the systems in March and a review of the high-end xw8400 workstation is underway; the review will be posted online as soon as practicable. For more information, go to HP’s Workstations web page.
Hewlett-Packard
Palo Alto, CA
KNITRO Add-on Available for Mathematica
Wolfram Research and Ziena Optimization say that they have joined forces to provide solutions to complex nonlinear optimization problems.
KNITRO software for large-scale nonlinear optimization is now available from Wolfram Research (Champaign, IL) as an add-on to Mathematica. Developed and supported by Ziena Optimization Inc. (Evanston, IL), the new KNITRO for Mathematica application package provides a tool for solving problems that range from business-process reengineering and production-line management to form-factor reduction and the optimization of integrated circuit layouts. KNITRO requires Mathematica 5.1 or higher, and it runs on Windows, Linux, or Sun Solaris platforms.
As a local solver, KNITRO for Mathematica finds a local minimum for problems with continuous variables and smooth functions. It solves general nonlinear constrained, linear programming, quadratic programming, unconstrained, and least squares problems, as well as systems of nonlinear equations.
Key features are said to include Newton-based methods, including BFGS, SR1, and L-BFGS; an option requiring that every iteration is feasible with respect to inequality constraints and variable bounds; crossover from interior-point to active-set algorithms for determining vertex solutions; linear algebra operations for iterative (conjugate gradient) and direct (sparse factorization) methods; and automatic starting point selection.
KNITRO software is available for immediate download from the Wolfram web store. It costs: $2,500 (30% discount available on all standard purchases through June 30, 2006).
Visit the KNITRO for Mathematica web page for full details.
Wolfram Research
Champaign, IL
Ziena Optimization
Evanston, IL
UGS Corp. and Microsoft announced a multiyear alliance to change how companies create products by delivering the full suite of UGS product lifecycle management (PLM) software solutions on the Microsoft platform. According to a UGS press release, the alliance will help UGS deliver its PLM technology on the Microsoft platform to give manufacturers the ability to create and manage all their product data in an easy-to-use and secure environment while allowing global team members, customers, industry partners, and vendors to participate in the creative process.
By building on existing technology investments from Microsoft and leveraging the PLM expertise of UGS, both alliance partners expect to empower customer employees to collaborate, expedite decision-making, and increase efficiency by getting products to market faster. As manufacturers realize the competitive advantage of collaborative PLM solutions, the PLM market is expected to show a five-year compound annual growth rate of 9 percent, growing from $9.7 billion to $15 billion, according to a recent AMR research report.
It is expected that by optimizing for the Microsoft platform in today’s global economy, manufacturers will deliver greater customer value through solutions that are easy to use, deploy, and maintain while reducing ownership and integration costs.
“Microsoft’s investment in enterprise scalability and UGS’ rapid adoption of Microsoft’s platform will enable our joint customers to increase the quality and quantity of more secure connections with trading partners around the world to speed time to market and realize the full benefit of PLM,” said Tony Affuso, chairman, CEO, and president of UGS in the press statement.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft will work with UGS in its development of PLM software using a broad range of current and future Microsoft products, including Microsoft.NET, Visual Studio 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
UGS’s Teamcenter and it Velocity Series portfolio, which run on Windows client and Windows Server platforms, will be enhanced for the Microsoft platform to better serve the needs of mutual customers in engineering and manufacturing industries.
In other news, UGS announced the releases of Femap Version 9.2 and Tecnomatix Version 7.6.
Femap Version 9.2 is the latest version of UGS’ pre- and postprocessing finite element modeling application. Femap is the finite element analysis (FEA) component of the company’s Velocity Series portfolio of digital product design, analysis, and data management software.
Femap Version 9.2 offers finite element modeling functionality that provides access to advanced analysis solutions in a native Windows environment. According to a press release, it is also highly integrated with the Nastran solver to form a broad and comprehensive CAE solution.
New functionality in Femap 9.2 includes capabilities for handling assemblies, including automatic surface contact detection; support of glued surface connection functionality recently released with NX Nastran 4.1; consolidation of contact functionality within the user interface for easier access to contact definitions; and more.
Many of the changes in Tecnomatix 7.6, the latest version of the company’s digital manufacturing suite, have been focused on trimming the time required for process design and validation tasks. These enhancements include a new automatic weld point distribution tool, a process mirroring capability,an automatic path planning capability,and a new distributed flow simulation experiment capability.
UGS says the new release of Tecnomatix has tighter integration with its Teamcenter solution and closer alignment with the PLM Open business model. This, says the company, makes significant progress in closing the gap that exists between product and process design for the entire global manufacturing industry.
Microsoft
Redmond, WA
UGS
Plano, TX
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DE’s editors contribute news and new product announcements to Digital Engineering.
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