Courtesy EcoScapes (http://www.ecoscapes.net)

Last year was my first time attending DVCon. So, that was the first time I got to witness the infamous EDA Troublemakers Panel. Last year Peggy Aycinena channeled her inner John Cooley with a provocative panel discussion entitled “EDA: Dead or Alive”. Of course, the EDA world looked very bleak back then, just months after the financial meltdown, Cadence financial woes, EDA layoffs left and right, VC funds shutting down … a forest fire of bad news sweeping the industry.

But just as the wildflowers bloom after the wildfire, optimism is returning to the EDA industry. (Gosh, that sounds really corny, huh). So it’s not too surprising that two EDA veterans will be at DVCon this year heralding EDA’s return. Fellow EDA blogger Paul McLellan and EDA Hall-of-Famer Jim Hogan have become the Captain and Tennille of EDA. They spoke at ICCAD on the future of chip design. And now they are giving another talk during DVCon entitled “So you want to start up an EDA company? Here’s how…”.

I don’t know what these guys are going to say, but if I were them, here are a few things that I’d point out that make for some optimism for starting up an EDA company now:

• There are lots of good EDA people looking for work, so this is a good time to partner with them or to get them on board for a lower salary than you’d have to pay otherwise.
• Small companies are able to use technology to their benefit to lower their cost of development. Development hardware is cheap and even rent-able through cloud computing providers. Open source software tools abound. The biggest cost will be your time.
• The cost of sales is dropping due to new technology. WebEx. GoToMeeting. Skype. Xuropa. These tools and others enable you to reach out to customers globally while never leaving your office.
• Then again, who needs an office? Working from home has never been easier.
• And who cares where you are located? It’s easy enough to collaborate with your virtual team globally. (Xuropa has people in the Bay Area, the LA Area, and France).
  
• The lack of VC money can also be a good thing. You retain ownership and control of the company and don’t have a “timetable” to “cash out”.
• The lack of VC funding also forces you to think about getting cash flow positive as quickly as possible. Rather than wasting time and money designing the perfect product, you’re forced to start selling it early which leads to better feedback and a better product.

The idea that the downturn is an opportunity is not new. In fact, Sean Murphy has been spearheading the whole concept of bootstrapping for some time now. Check out his site for some great advice. Also, Dharmesh Shah, founder of Hubspot, writes a great blog on this subject as well.

I’m still not sure if I’ll make it to DVCon this year, but if I do, I will definitely attend this session. If not, I’m sure someone from Xuropa will be there. Just like my EDA SaaS and Cloud Computing Roundtable last year, it’s not part of the regular program. It will be held Tuesday evening Feb 23rd from 6:30 – 7:30 in the Oak Ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel (where DVCon is going on). This will be right after the DVCon reception, so grab a beer or a glass of wine and head on over.

I hope to see you there.

This question, and many more are to be explored in a panel that promises to be fascinating and useful.  The event is organized by the Association for Corporate Growth (of which I am a member), and held at Cadence Design Systems in San Jose.

For more information and to register, go here.

Date/Time:

Thursday, January 28th, 2010; 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM

Location:

Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
2644 Seely Avenue, Building 10
San Jose, CA

Panelists:

Peter Coffee
Director of Platform Research
Salesforce.com

David Sacks
Chief Executive Officer
Yammer, Inc.

Charlene Marini
Director, Corporate Marketing
ARM, Inc.

Dr. Peter Young
Adjunct Professor, New Media
SJSU

Steve Brown
Director of System Design and
Verification Marketing
Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

Garrett Herbert
Partner - Merger & Acquisition Services
Deloitte & Touche LLP

See you there!

Maybe the benefits of the technology are slightly exaggerated here

Photo via Tipiro

It is interesting to see the recent commentary regarding the environmental effects of Cloud Computing, and I’m happy to see the dialog coming while the industry is still in its infancy.  If only the same could have happened with the automotive industry - what a different world we’d live in today!

As Reuven Cohen (CTO of Enomaly, a Cloud provider) writes,

“The general consensus says that reducing the number of hardware components and replacing them with remote cloud computing systems reduces energy costs for running hardware and cooling as well as reduces your carbon foot print while higher DC consolidation / optimization will conserve energy.”

But as Mr. Cohen and James Urquhart (Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Computing and Virtualized Data Centers at Cisco) agree - there is no proof.  There is no standard measurement or parameter that everyone agrees indicates that the net result is better or worse for the environment.  And so for now we’re really discussing the hypothetical and using deduction to point us in the right direction.

One point we can all agree on - as a civilization, we’re doing more computational work now than ever before.  Of course, this will only continue to grow, and exponentially. 

Think about the rate of increase in the number of people performing some sort of computation (for example, the 300+ million members of Facebook all uploading photographs and playing Mafia Wars) and the rate of increase in the amount of data to be manipulated (consider a 5 megapixel camera built into everyone’s phone, or everyone watching Avatar in HD on Hulu).  All the while, in the cloud, processors will be running algorithms to deliver the experience while constantly making adjustments as they dynamically navigate the trade-off between data size, connection speed, and client performance (processor and screen resolution).

The question is, are we more environmentally friendly doing all of this in a shared Cloud or on our own datacenters?

Mr. Urquhart’s reasoning takes us in a positive direction,

“I believe one thing to be true: the increased efficiency of the hardware components in most cloud data centers and the increased utilization of these components mean that we are almost certainly doing more work per unit of energy consumed than before.”

But on the face of it, I can only agree with part of this.  Indeed, greater efficiency built into the hardware is a good thing for the environment - the lower the power consumed and the greater the amount of work done per clock tick of the processor is good.  However, greater utilization of that hardware due to virtualization could take us in the opposite direction with respect to the environment.

Firstly, (as both Mr. Urquhart and Cohen agree) the more compute cycles available, the more we’ll use.  It’s what we do.  Therefore, increased utilization due to virtualization will actually increase energy consumption and impact the environment negatively in absolute terms.

But more subtly, how the compute power is delivered is actually more important in comparing a datacenter to a virtualized cloud.  Virtualization improves utilization, but does it improve system energy efficiency over the same workload?

Whether the hardware is virtualized or not - the processor still needs to tick.  In fact, through virtualization, the processor needs to work harder with more fetches from cache, DRAM, or the hard drive to deliver the same calculated result to the end user.  And so, on the face of it, greater utilization due to virtualization actually impacts the environment negatively…for now.

We need to go back to the hardware to turn this around.  Virtualized servers drive the high-end of the processor lines of the physical servers that support them.  The increased demands of compute power per square millimeter of the processor and parallelization/efficiency within them will drive overall energy efficiency of the system in the right direction.

One additional point to consider is data distribution.  The power it takes to deliver the compute power from the cloud/data center to the remote user has an impact.  A centralized cloud vs multiple distributed datacenters (from different service vendors) and their proximity to the users needs to be added into the equation.  If we’re talking about consumer services sharing a cloud, the impact of centralization will be significant and detrimental.  However, corporations using their own local datacenters on-site are much more energy efficient in data transport energy costs.

Clearly, the calculation is not straight forward, and when all’s said and done, it may only be interesting from an academic perspective.

Fortunately for all of us, being green is considered by many to be a tier one value proposition during the purchase process of equipment and services.  This demand will get baked into the product definition process and we’ll all move in the right direction.  One point that is without argument however - it’s a heck of a lot greener to work remotely on a cloud or datacenter, than either shipping CDROMs or getting on a plane and working on-site.

Scott Hamilton

With the 2010 Winter Olympics approaching, there has been some talk recently about those sports that Americans talk about once every 4 years. One of them is figure skating.

Now, I’m not much of a figure skating fan myself, but my mother-in-law is. And all this talk reminded me of the time we took her to an ice skating show at the LA Forum. It was not just any old show … it was Scott Hamilton’s return to figure skating after a fight with testicular cancer. Scott was as close to a superstar as there was in men’s figure skating, having invented the back-flip and won the Gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. So seeing him back on the ice was a feel good story.

The show featured a lot of other well known figure skaters, including Dorothy Hamill and Katerina Witt, but the climax was towards the end when Scott Hamilton took the ice. Cheers went through the crowd as he performed move after move, if not flawlessly, at least without major error. Then came the moment of truth. Scott would now perform his famous back-flip.

The lights dimmed. A lone spotlight. A drum roll. Scott Hamilton took a deep breath, began his run, turned backwards, took off ……. and fell

Obviously, it was disappointing. This show was being recorded and going to be shown a week later on Network TV, so unfortunately it would not be as great a moment as we’d anticipated.

When the show ended we started to gather our things when an announcement came over the PA that went something like this: “we’d like to do some extra takes of certain parts of the show. If you would like to stay, please come over to the west side of the forum and fill in the seats over there.”

What happened next I should have anticipated, but for some reason I was naive. The show producers proceeded to repeat parts of the performance where skaters had fallen or stumbled.  And of course, that included Scott Hamilton’s back-flip. Time after time the lights dimmed, the spotlight fell, and Scott skated and tried his back-flip. Finally, I think it was after 4 or 5 tries, Scott Hamilton nailed it and a roar went through the crowd.

I made a point of watching the performance when it aired on TV a week or so later. And sure enough, nobody fell or even slipped up. And of course, Scott Hamilton successfully executed his back-flip on his first try, to the cheers of a huge crowd.

Having been in the EDA business for many years, I know that a lot of EDA tool demos are a lot like Scott Hamilton’s return performance. If features don’t quite work, the demo avoids those features. Or if the feature is critical, then that is the one that gets fixed while other not-so-critical features may be left broken. It’s part of the smoke and mirrors that is the least well kept secret of EDA tool demos. The customer knows that the EDA company is avoiding the holes in its product.

But what if you don’t have big holes in your product? What if your tool really can nail that back-flip on the first pass? What if your tool really is a “game changer”? Won’t they believe you if you show them? After all, seeing is believing!

Unfortunately, customers have become so cynical and jaded about EDA tools and EDA salespeople that they hardly ever believe what they see anymore. I know. I’m also one of those customers. Read ESNUG or any one of the many EDA forums and you’ll know that I’m right.

But what if they could try the tool out themselves? No strings attached. That’s what we are trying to do with the Xuropa labs. To give your jaded, non-trusting, cynical customer a chance to try your fabulous tools himself.

“Seeing is believing” is no longer good enough. “Doing is believing” is the new reality.

If you’d like to see what a Xuropa Online Lab is like, you can try it out here. We’ve got some tools loaded and you can play with them as long as you like. No strings attached.

Oh, and to be fair to Scott Hamilton, here’s a video of him nailing that same back-flip just a few weeks ago. In this case, seeing is believing.

Since the recession officially started two years ago, we’ve all been focused on the bottom line and cutting costs like crazy.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in December that Productivity in the non-farm business sector in Q3 of 2009 rose by 8.1%, the largest increase since the same quarter in 2003.  Which means that businesses are doing a great job of getting the most out of their remaining workforce after multiple Reductions in Force.

However, as we move forward, we need to change our focus if we’re to do more than just survive.

Moving Focus to the Top Line

So the question is, while we’re on the path to recovery, how can we take advantage of the sales opportunities that arise and grow the top line?  Traditionally, if we were to focus on increasing sales we’d have to invest ahead of the curve in sales resources - new or additional account, regional, country, or market coverage. 

In this environment, the length of a sales cycle is not predictable and when the recovery will actually occur is unknown.  This brings a great deal of “Balance Sheet Uncertainty” when companies do not have the resources to gamble.

Balance Sheet Uncertainty

So again, what do we do to get back into growth?

Enterprise Software - Take Your Product and Business Online

Fortunately, for Enterprise Software companies, there is an option - move your software and sales process online.  I do not mean for you to rewrite your software and business model overnight, but to install your software as-is on the Xuropa Platform.  You can then delivery your product for demonstrations, evaluations, training, or even in a post-sales Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

In this manner, you are able to lower your cost of sales while focusing on growing your top line revenues.

Revenue Growth with Xuropa

Once your software is installed on the Xuropa Platform, you’ll be able to employ it to solve a large number of sales challenges.  And your business will be able to participate in the benefits of the SaaS model without having to re-invent your company. 

For more information on how we can grow your revenues, contact us at sales[at]xuropa[dot]com.

Slower than other platforms (eg. Facebook Connect), LinkedIn has been integrating out into the web, but now the pace is really picking up. 

On November 9th LinkedIn announced the Twitter partnership, and then came the really exciting news - the doors really flew open with an official LinkedIn Platform play on November 23rd.

We’ve been waiting for this a long time.  Ever since we enabled the import of LinkedIn Profiles into your Xuropa Profile we’ve wanted to enable our users to move data smoothly between the two platforms. We’re not about re-inventing wheels if we don’t have to.

Currently, we’re on a march to improve the overall usability of the Xuropa Platform.  But look forward to some interesting integrations in the future.

While most software applications only dream of having to deal with the level of scale Facebook does, it does point to a couple of key points in the transition to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):

Multi-tenant Architecture

This is a fundamental premise for the business model to succeed for many SaaS vendors.  Essentially, it is the use of the same software stack by multiple unassociated users.  The challenges here are security and scale.  Security is quite straight forward once a solid user registration and management system has been put in place.  Scale is a bit trickier because it is dynamic.

Cloud Infrastructure Provider

This is the hardware (CPUs, memory, and storage) that the application runs on.  Even though the architecture of the SaaS application could be developed to scale, the Cloud Infrastructure needs to be in place to support scale robustly (both the scaling up and the scaling down).  There’s a reliance on the robustness of both the hardware and software architectures.

Facebook has their own datacenters.  According to Datacenter Knowledge, as of April this year the Facebook datacenter stores more than 40 Billion photos and users upload nearly 40 million new photos per day!  Now, that’s scale!

Multiple requests are in to FB for when they’re back up…hopefully it’s soon, or we might be forced into actually picking up the phone and talking to our mothers-in-law.

UPDATE: Facebook is back up in San Francisco as of 18:00 PST.  (Disaster averted!)  But I see from Twitter that a lot of people are still having trouble with the platform.

UPDATE II: (18:15 PST) Facebook have disabled Chat - a clever way of freeing up some bandwidth for some?  Many are still struggling to get back on the platform.

In an effort to simplify the discussion, a recent post of his, “When is a cloud not a cloud?“, begins to define different types of “Clouds” from the perspective of the original cloud - the internet.  He lists three different types - Captive Cloud, Public Cloud (AWS, the Xuropa Platform primary cloud provider), and Virtual Private Cloud (a “walled off” cloud within a Public Cloud, like AWS). 

The post is worth a read, but he starts to run aground on two points IMO.  Firstly, to isolate connectivity as the key defining characteristic is to emphasize what should be a “cost of entry” point, and glosses over real value differentiators (eg. resource management via API).  Secondly, he really does himself a disservice when he includes “Captive Clouds” as a type of cloud (even though he was trying to be ironic).  We already have a name for that - “datacenter”.  A collection of networked servers running something like VMWare behind a firewall is not a “cloud” of any description.  It is a datacenter with better hardware utilization than the datacenters of the 90’s.  That’s it.  To put the word “cloud” in the same sentence as “datacenter” reduces clarity rather than enhances it.

San Francisco, California – October 13, 2009 – Xuropa^SM Incorporated today announced that Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDNS) has added Incisive® Formal Verifier and Incisive Enterprise Specman-Elite ® Testbench to its Xuropa Online Labs.

Based upon the Cadence® SoC Functional Verification Kit, approved design and verification engineers can quickly and easily try out these two additional Cadence verification products and learn new techniques online. The SoC Functional Verification Kit automates and eases the adoption of new verification technologies that increase productivity and project predictability, from verification planning to closure.

Users can now also run testbench simulation and formal analysis on example circuits at their convenience from their desktops. Using only a standard web browser, approved visitors to Xuropa Labs™ can now access the following two new labs:

• Block, Chip, and System Testbench Verification with Incisive Enterprise Specman-Elite Testbench
• Connectivity Verification, Productivity Flows, and Designer Level Formal Analysis with Incisive Formal Verifier

The service is free to Xuropa members and dramatically simplifies the process of evaluating EDA software products. Users can begin to test-drive applications in minutes vs. the days or weeks it used to take to get agreements signed, software downloaded, and license keys installed.

Simplified Initial Product Evaluation

“We have seen the value that Xuropa Online Labs bring to enable customers to test-drive Incisive Verification IP online, and we are excited to meet more customer needs by expanding our offering,” said Sarah Lynne Lundell, Enterprise Verification Senior Product Marketing Manager at Cadence. “Today’s schedules are so tight, it is important to simplify the initial evaluation process. Removing the need for a Software Product License Agreement to evaluate new software lets design and verification engineers focus on the potential productivity, predictability and quality gains for their projects.”

Face-to-face meetings are always going to be important, but as design teams are now global, software vendors need to simultaneously engage multiple locations and accelerate the engagement process.

“The Xuropa Platform uses the power of Cloud Computing and web 2.0 technologies to accelerate the software sales process and increase revenues for software vendors,” Xuropa CEO and founder James Colgan explained. “The Xuropa team is very happy to see Cadence realize the returns of the platform and make more of their industry leading technology available on the platform.”

Availability

Xuropa Online Labs featuring Cadence Incisive Formal Verifier and Specman Elite Testbench are available today and accessible at no cost to authorized Xuropa members. Go to www.xuropa.com and sign-in for access. For information about how to create your own Online Lab, or any of the other Xuropa Platform products, please contact Xuropa at the address below.

About Xuropa Incorporated

The Xuropa Platform and a Xuropa Lab™ bridge the gap between traditional Enterprise Software and Software-as-a-Service business and distribution models. Xuropa^SM Incorporated was founded by veterans from the internet, IT, and electronics industries with the goal of transitioning Enterprise Software to a SaaS model to increase revenues and lower costs.  http://www.xuropa.com/

Contact:

sales@xuropa.com

+1 (415) 727-5741

Cadence, Specman-Elite and Incisive are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.