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Cadence bailing out of OrCAD?
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Thursday, March 20, 2003
Cadence Design Systems Inc. quietly transitioned sales and support of its OrCAD shrink-wrapped PCB design tools in North America to a value-added reseller, EMA, earlier this year. Coupled with a downsizing earlier this year of OrCAD's staff, the move has opened the door for competitors to claim that Cadence is abandoning or neglecting the shrink wrapped PCB tools market.
But Cadence PCB Systems division vice president of marketing Jamie Metcalf said that is not true — and in fact, he said, the VAR agreement with EMA has bolstered OrCAD sales efforts as Cadence continues to pour R&D dollars into strengthening that line of software.
"There are competitors out there that would have customers think that we are mothballing the OrCAD line of products," said Metcalf. "That is not the case."
Cadence purchased OrCAD in June of 1999 to fill in a hole in its PCB tool lineup. Before that acquisition, the company offered tools for mid and expert level PCB tool designers with its Allegro Studio and Allegro lines starting around $10,000, but was lacking an entry-level product.
The OrCAD acquisition gave Cadence not only a full line of entry-level PCB tools starting around $1,500, but also and perhaps more importantly, access to OrCAD's thousands of users. Cadence saw the acquisition as an opportunity to offer OrCAD customers an upgrade path to Cadence's more sophisticated and more expensive product line.
"That has worked well for us," said Metcalf. "We see customers moving to Studio and Allegro as their designs get more complex and their technology needs change. We see a lot of customers who will use OrCAD Capture with Allegro, for example."
Metcalf said that Cadence's sales dept has traditionally worked with a low volume, high priced model, where OrCAD's tool line is a high volume, low priced business. As such, Metcalf said, the OrCAD tools can be better distributed through a large VAR such as EMA, allowing Cadence to focus its internal sales department on selling the more advanced tools.
"We used to do OrCAD sales in North America ourselves but had VARs resell the tools in the rest of the world," said Metcalf. "Now we have extended our use of VARs to North America and feel they can do a better job of it, quite frankly."
Metcalf noted that Cadence will continue its OrCAD R&D efforts in India to improve the OrCAD line, and he said a new upgrade will be released mid year.
By: DocMemory
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