Siemens acquires Mentor Graphics | Hacker News Reader

Siemens acquires Mentor Graphics

community.plm.automation.siemens.com

147 pointsJoshTriplett47 comments

The company I work for was acquired by Siemens PLM last year. I was worried at first, but it proved to be much better than expected.

First of all it should be noted that Siemens PLM Software is a different company than Siemens AG, with a different culture, different internal rules and quite a different business. Most Siemens PLM employees come from other acquisitions and they (Siemens) tend to keep the people and integrate them as good as possible(in our case all employees were offered contracts and very few decided to leave the company after the merger).

For us there was a slight downgrade in terms of internal systems (eg. from G-Suite to Exchange and Outlook 2013 and other such changes, but at least we can use Win10 instead of Win7).

On the more negative side, the process for traveling is a impossibly complicated and there are several other procedures as well that are unnecessarily complex and take a long time to go through.

Overall for me it was a positive change so far and my advice to Mentor Graphic employees is not to worry too much, change is coming but it will be slow and not disruptive.

Siemens culture is aimed right at business integration. They won't buy an organization and pretend to run it.

They will oversee it and merge planning with the other divisions, but this is measured and well staged. Siemens AG is a very old, very smart people and metrics driven company. They are a very good example of how to do this stuff right.

Your comments seconded.

>from G-Suite to Exchange and Outlook 2013

I actually think of that as an upgrade. Or at best they are pretty much the same. I have yet to see a Email solution that is any good.

I think they (g-suite, MS suite) solve a bit different problems and I would agree that MS suite is more suitable for established enterprise with e.g. ability to book meeting times and places, lync integration with e.g. tandberg.

I used to work at a company which was eventually acquired by Siemens PLM (there were some intermediate merges and acquisitions as well). We had a pretty neat CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) product called I-deas - you could build a part then watch heat transfer or mechanical deformation take place under various forces and conditions.

Also it was funny how we found out about the acquisition. We showed up one morning and one person in next cubicle yells out "hey check out CNN, looks like we've been acquired". I was just an intern so didn't affect me much but other developers were pretty shaken by that.

Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics have been fighting it out in the EDA industry for decades. Synopsys and Cadence are the leaders of the pack. Synopsis has been the better stock over the last 7 years, however, Cadence has picked up well too.

The industry is basically derelict which may be surprising to a lot of people. The design and layout software hasn't changed much in decades. Analog/RF mixed signal circuit design in particular is arcane, manual magic even though it doesn't have to be with modern computing power and simulation capabilities.

The main problem is that somehow there just isn't much money to be made in EDA tooling. Go to any EDA conference and ask anyone in a business booth.

Seems to be a general problem with design tools in many industries, isn't it?

When the jobs disappear it's hard to sell picks and shovels.

What I heard from them is most of the money comes from a small percentage of customers doing expensive work. They don't want to take chances on unproven tools since mistakes cost too much. So, they keep using the Big 3. There's occasionally companies like Magma that show up delivering good value for a fraction of the price. Plus cheaper or better alternatives to Big 3 functionality such as Tanner. They usually get acquired, though, by companies that dislike effect of competition on profits. The integration of those features make the competition look even worse.

Those successful in EDA seem to mostly be niche players doing one job a lot better than Big 3.

There's quite a bit of money, a license for a small design shop will easily span from mid six figures to millions. There is rampant theft though, see the recent http://norcalrecord.com/stories/511081584-synopsis-claims-ub... as an example

The real reason innovation died is a complex and meandering sadness, but basically the business leaders prioritized head count and comfort over whatever it takes to lure creative, intelligent, academic, etc people into an industry and do non-linear things. I think there are similar parallels to computer architecture and operating systems, but these are a bit more widely approachable so there's still a small influx of academics and new companies.

> There is rampant theft though, see the recent http://norcalrecord.com/stories/511081584-synopsis-claims-ub.... as an example

This is not theft, but unauthorized use of the software.

There were some startups in the 90's doing analog synthesis, but all flopped.

Tools for MMIC & RFIC design have become pretty advanced (specifically AWR).

I think part of it is that the cost of messing up and having an undetected design fault in deployed hardware can be so huge for the big players. The big players are where the EDA vendors make most of their money and so derive their mindset. You make money by being reliable, and the easiest way to be reliable is to be conservative. Once the design process works, don't mess with it in case something breaks.

I last used OrCad about ten years ago, and I hoped to never have to look at it again. It was a shit show, and even the terrible state of the open source tools available at the time was better. The whole EDA industry is a shit show, and it's no wonder they don't make any money; it's because they keep bodging on bit and bobs of incremental improvements, usually after someone else independently invents them. Why would anyone upgrade when the new stuff was the same as the old stuff? And look at what horrible problems document revision control are for CAD tools, they spawned a whole 'nother industry just to do the clerical work for the engineering staff.

>Synopsys and Cadence are the leaders of the pack.

Only by default and only through the inertia of lazy risk-averse management.

The CAD/EDA industry is a scourge.

Eh, I think you're being too hard. Although PCB tools might be different, as far as IC design goes, most of the problems at the earlier nodes were solved by the EDA companies throwing legions of (very expensive!) PhDs at the problem. I do agree that some things are annoying, such as documentation and UI, but a lot of this is because (scarce!) money is prioritized to solving problems and fixing bugs and they don't want to take a chance destroying the system. In particular, major customers tend to be extremely risk averse.

My introduction to a Unix like operating system was using Aegis on the old Apollo workstations that Mentor came out on. (Installing software with giant 8 inch floppies was big fun)

After getting smoked by Sun, Apollo was absorbed by HP in the 90's...

I had HP Microwave Design System on an Apollo workstation.

Mentor also owned CodeSourcery. Wonder if that's getting buried even further now.

It's not, codesourcery was combined with Nucleus and provided as a completed suit called readystart. We have a really good support for hardware out there. I know codesourcery alone would have been enough but they just repackaged it.

P.S. I work on Nucleus..

Mentor Graphics is also a big player in the Automotive industry supplying many large OEMs and Suppliers with AutoSAR platforms (among others) and integration engineering services.

It will be interesting how this plays out in that domain.

"By the way, once Mentor Graphics is integrated, you will see there, up on the left side, a $4.7 billion revenue, which brings us to the top 10 of software companies globally. Believe it or not, this is our best strength. And if you really look at that, we are really focused on our industry software. We are amongst the leaders. And that's a very powerful portfolio which helps us really driving the digitalization agenda at our customers very much. You see already in MindSphere the operating system, open operating system. I will explain to you what it does and how it benefits our customers, some of the benefits."

Sounds like management just wanted to say they run a big company. I don't see why this acquisition makes sense for shareholders

They already produce various simulation tools for simulation aspects of factories (robots, production lines, etc). Adding a "RTL simulator" company seems like a logical step, the verification problems share a lot of common and you get to claim that you are able to simulate the industrial robot including its custom microchips, or a car seat (they have custom chips for the airbags for example).

Isn't this old news? I heard about it roughly four months ago and don't work for either company.

Yes, it looks like the sale just wrapped up today [1].

1. http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2017/03/s...

The acquisition was announced last November but it appears that the deal actually closed today.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Siemens has a number of different hardware systems and Mentor Graphics could provide a better solution for them as they work to transition away from hardware.

Avaya struggled with this in the telecom space and are struggling to survive. Siemens' telecom gear is a distant 3rd to Avaya and Cisco, but if they can do what both of them have been unable to do up to this point, they may be able to gobble up some market share in the enterprise communication space on top of their other hardware solutions.

> Siemens' telecom gear

Siemens hasn't been active in the telecom space for a while, they gave up on this business more than 10 years ago. Unify, formerly Siemens Enterprise Communications (majority-owned by Gores Group since 2008), has been a 100 % subsidiary of Atos for over a year now.

Ah you're right. Totally forgot about that. Thanks for clarifying. :)

That doesn't mean it makes sense - what synergies do Siemens have that justify them purchasing mentor instead of giving the money to the shareholders through a dividend, and letting them purchase Mentor if they felt it worthwhile?

I don't want to date how old I am, but when I first started as a developer in Oregon, Mentor Graphics was big into object oriented programming. They even had a OOPS research think tank, but can't remember it's name.

.. and noone here (including myself) has any clue what it means in real-life. There is no discussion of potential consequences etc.

I'm not sure this is how it should be (EDA professionals congregrate elsewhere, I assume)... but it kinda sucks. These things are so important to our collective progression, but it's all done in closed-source silos when it comes to hardware things.

Having gone through the whole NSN merge, I hope the Mentor Graphics guys and girls are luckier than we were.

Where do EDA types congregate?

EDIcon, DesignCon, etc.

Back when I was at Intel I wasn't aware of anyone frequenting EDA-specific forums. The annual IDC (Intel Developers Conference) was the biggest physical meetup as far as I recall. Also, there were the other company-led events. Very segmented.

For IC design the main independent online resource is Deepchip.

It doesn't have to be done in closed-source silos, people just choose to do it that way. There's open-source EDA software out there: Kicad is my favorite for PCB design. It works better than the PADS software I used years ago, and from what I hear from people using proprietary EDA software currently, the new stuff really isn't any better.

Does anyone actually use Tormentor (other than Calibre for DRC)?

how does this make sense? Siemens really has nothing to do with EDA/etc.

Now they do.

One of the biggest customers of Mentor for sure

Integrated digital manufacturing, product design, simulation...

This purchase completes the picture for Siemens, who will now be able to fully represent and manage a product from conception through end of life. Manufacturing, service, design, code, electronics, etc...

It's been a while coming, but this vision has been in play for a decade or few.

Integration, one single source of truth, team collaboration, global engineering all deliver very serious efficiencies when compared to discrete solutions, not unified in the way Siemens is doing.

What? Siemens has a whole division working on PLM, including the high-end NX CAD system. No doubt the plan involves integrating Mentor's EDA with NX.

Not to mention parasoled which is the core of almost every other commercial CAD program.

Wasn't so long ago that Siemens not only designed ICs but also fabbed them. That's where Infineon came from, after all.

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