Harry, …. waiting for your Xuropa specifc posts

GJ

While EDA firms (all firms, actually) are trying to reduce travel, there are other hazards when you have to travel - loss of laptop computers, and any data aboard including and beyond the actual software; and scanning of laptops and other devices by authorities who end up with sensitive data on their hands. Law firms have taken to sending staff on the road with clean laptops, reloading images at the destination, uploading current state and then clearing prior to departure.

You are talking about individual technologies that certainly have merit (YouTube, WebEx, etc.) and find their place.

At the risk of this sounding like a “sales pitch”, by contrast, Xuropa is trying to create an overall experience customized for EDA tool access. This includes the ability to view demos, and also work independently or colaboratively, and also have the connection be secure, and support EDA licensing, and enable customers to interact with eachother in a community sense. Not all those pieces are there yet and not to the level desired, but that is the goal and I think how Xuropa is different.

Have you used a Xuropa lab? I’d be interested in your feedback once you go through the process. Let me know if you are interested and I can make sure we grant you access?

Same goes for others who are interested.

Harry

One offering you don’t mention that I think may be important in motivating the adoption of hybrid cloud computing models is the workload analyzer by Runtime Design http://www.rtda.com/ (which Univa is also reselling). It allows a design team to replay the same workload over different grid/cloud configurations (license mix, hardware mix) and get an idea of the difference in completion times. Andrea Casotto presented a 26,000 job visualization at the Project Health Birds of a Feather at DAC (see http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2009/08/07/managing-project-health-birds-of-a-feather-at-dac-2009/ ) which was quite interesting. I think we will need tools that allow us to visualize the complex meshes that “design flows” have become, and simulate them, in order to appreciate some of the advantages that a hybrid model (one that mixes a local grid with some jobs dispatched to cloud machines on the Internet) offers for a specific project or problem set.

I think Imera’s debugger represents a possible of “half-SaaS” (TM) option emerging for EDA. It gives an on premises software vendor many of the advantages of Saas (in particular more visibility into customer problems and perhaps usage) without having to convince the customer to fully embrace SaaS. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but cite it as another example of a hybrid model where the meaning of “on premises” is extended to included aspects of a SaaS offering. On the “data” side I think the IP vendors will be offering similar hybrid models for shared configuration and realtime support.

I had a chance to meet one of the folks from R-Systems at a Conversation Central event facilitated by Rick Jamison. His sales pitch seemed to be “I am from the future and things work better there.” I asked him what the source of their profits was if it didn’t come out of the software supplier (e.g. Cadence, Synopsys) or the hardware supplier (e.g. Sun) pocket. It wasn’t clear what their real business was or the nature of their competitive advantage for a firm that was already running a compute farm/grid/cloud in-house and/or leveraging Amazon AWS or Rackspace’s Mosso.

As to Xuropa you identify a number of trends that support the need for a remote demonstration capability but how their offer is meaningfully differentiated–and it’s attendant ROI–are not clear from reading their material. I don’t expect you to include a sales pitch for them but there are a number of alternatives for delivering a remote demo. I would also note that not every tool evaluation necessarily needs a remote hands-on phase prior to doing an on-site evaluation. I am not saying that Xuropa won’t find a niche among Demos-On-Demand, YouTube, Webex, VNC, Flashlight-VNC, GoToMeeting, Oridus EDACruiser, … that are all already in use in EDA. But the status quo is not a plane flight but a complex set of alternative technologies and services.

Congratulations on the gig and kudos for your candor.