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Agilent Acquisition

Question asked by dmille on Jul 29, 2005
Latest reply on Sep 14, 2005 by ROB_LEFEBVRE

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The Agilent business model has classically been VERY different from that of Eagleware.

Is Agilent looking to ENTER and PLAY in this segment of the market , or are they looking to NUKE it? (and force us to pay ADS - like prices?)

Please pardon the rather "direct" nature of my query, but I am sure others have the same concerns...

Thanks,
Don

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MARKGOODBERLET Jul 29, 2005 11:04 AM
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My thoughts are along the same line as Don's. It's sad to see a company who could do it "better" and "cheaper" get gobbled up.
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abomp Jul 30, 2005 2:29 AM
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My thoughts exactly.. It appears they are going to the "dark side". Its too bad, because Eagleware made its software afforadable for the average Joe with a product that is just as good, if not better, than ADS. I believe those days are gone.
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ROB_LEFEBVRE Jul 30, 2005 3:42 AM
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It is very good to hear from some of our long time customers. I want to assure you that, before the Eagleware management pursued this transaction, we had to be convinced that our employees and our customers would be treated well. Agilent DOES want to "play" in this segment, and have publicly stated that there are absolutely no plans to merge GENESYS and ADS. They see tremendous value in our ability to create great products with a small team, and to do it profitably. They want to nurture and learn from that, not destroy it.

If any of you, or any other customers, have any concerns, I would encourage you to contact your sales person or to contact me personally.

Rob Lefebvre
CTO, Eagleware-Elanix

PS, You should be looking forward to our huge GENESYS 2005 release coming soon!
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RANDY_RHEA Jul 30, 2005 3:48 AM
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Hello All,

Agilent is not looking to play in the Eagleware-Elanix market, but to excel in it. They plan to keep both GENESYS and ADS tools, thus offering customers more choices. With Agilent's strong worldwide sales and support resources, you will see the growth of GENESYS use. This larger group of users will mean more opportunities for cross polination of ideas by users and more resources for GENESYS improvement.

Agilent has offered jobs to substantially all Eagleware-Elanix employees, and they will continue to work on GENESYS products. The intent is not to kill a great set of tools but use Agilent's worldwide channels to increase GENESYS use. Both GENESYS and ADS offer important solutions to RF problems. The acquisition is viewed positively by Eagleware and we are excited about the opportunities it offers for the products we spent 20 years building, as well as for our loyal customers.

Thanks for your past loyal support. Give us a chance to earn your continued support.

Clear skies and high Q
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kkijom Jul 31, 2005 12:26 AM
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hi,

"
They plan to keep both GENESYS and ADS tools
"

But do they plan to keep the big price disparity?, surely owning Genesys could be more harmful to ADS than having it as a competitor as far as the bottom line goes.

"
Agilent has offered jobs to substantially all Eagleware-Elanix employees
"

I am not sure what "substantially all" means, i guess it means some but not all . I am quite sure Agilent have made sure the key development staff are kept.

Can you reveal why the eagleware management persued this buy out?, surely the product is in an exponential take up stage now that is being used so widely and therefore generating significant revenues for the company?

Or did Agilent make an offer you couldn't refuse somehow?

"
they see tremendous value in our ability to create great products with a small team, and to do it profitably. They want to nurture and learn from that, not destroy it.
"

They see great value in the work you have done with the code/algorithms etc.. they will nurture the algorithms and code, learn from them, integrate them into ADS and bin the shell thats left?

I assume the buy out was merely for financial benefit to management/shareholders?

I maybe wrong of course.. but it's a familiar pattern.

[The administrator struck a non-constructive sentence here to keep the content at a PG level...]

lets hope all the customers don't end up screwed by the deal

Bill
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twilke Aug 1, 2005 8:02 AM
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"
I want to assure you that, before the Eagleware management pursued this transaction, we had to be convinced that our employees and our customers would be treated well. Agilent DOES want to "play" in this segment, and have publicly stated that there are absolutely no plans to merge GENESYS and ADS. They see tremendous value in our ability to create great products with a small team, and to do it profitably. They want to nurture and learn from that, not destroy it.

"

It really doesn't matter what Agilent promised. Once the acquisition is complete THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT. I remember when they purchased EESOF. They kept the products separate for a short period and that was all. Where can I purchase Touchstone or Jomega today?

I guess time will tell.

Tony
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ROB_LEFEBVRE Aug 1, 2005 8:17 AM
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I think that perspective is a little harsh. Agilent has a history of integrity and of following through on what they say. There is a history document on the Agilent site at http://eesof.tm.agilent.com/pdf/history_2001.pdf. To quote from that document:

"
In the mid 90â€™s, the two largest providers of RF/microwave EDA products announced a merger. HP acquired EEsof and began the process of combining the unique resources of each company into a single, capable provider of design, analysis and verification tools.
"

In that merger, HP announced from the beginning that they were going to completely merge the products and companies, which they did. In contrast, Agilent is on record saying that they have absolutely no plans to merge the GENESYS and ADS products.

Rob Lefebvre
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lrodri Aug 1, 2005 9:39 AM
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This question has more to do with the forum than anything else.

Will Agilent leave this as an open forum or will they close it up and throw it into a "one-way" (access-very-limited) knowledge-base (similar to ADS).

I only ask this because my Company has always been an Agilent subscriber (maybe now we could get a few seats of Genesys -which I believe to be far superior for everyday RF activities ), but they do not have anything even close to this forum where so many people get engaged into a topic.

Excuse me if I just do not put a lot of faith in their promises. I still remember ADS2002 / 2003 being a very bad port of the UNIX code (very sluggish), and it took a significant loss of market share from Eagleware and AWR to have them correct this (overwhelming negative feedback on the sluggishness of the system by customers was not good enough).
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dmille Aug 1, 2005 2:28 PM
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I think some of you guys are going a little off the deep end and over-reacting. True, my original post basically questioned Agilent's committment to this segment of the market -- but without any obvious evidence some of you guys have already concluded that they are already planning to abandon ("nuke" in my original post) the "reasonably-priced" RF EDA market.

Have you guys read anything in this thread to really support that?

My contention was that this was not the area that Agilent usually played in, but don't you think they see value in this segment? I'm guessing that growth is slow on the high end these days...

I'm guessing that there will be very little different about Eagleware in the short term. In the longer term, the longevity of the "Eagleware" that we have known will depend on how happy Agilent keeps the core Eagleware team and their ability to retain them after their "golden handcuffs" go away...

As far as the "dis'ing" of the ADS product --- I've used it in another lifetime and found it to be an outstanding, if expensive product. We had outstanding support from HP, and suggestions we made to our local FAE seemed to always show up in the new release. The local FAE seemed to be "fired-up" about the product and genuinely happy with his job. He is now president of a company that specializes in reasonably priced RF EDA software...

Randy, Todd, Rob: I think that you might interpret the "emotion" in this thread as sort of a compliment. I don't think the community would fear this change so much if you guys hadn't been doing such an outstanding job all along.

Don
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ewadmin Aug 2, 2005 10:45 AM
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Note from the forum administrators: Some of the messages in this thread were removed after it was determined that they were not actually posted by "uninterested" parties. Additionally, while the free-spirited debate is appreciated, it is encouraged to refrain from the inappropriate use of "adult" language.

Thank you,
Eagleware Customer Success Group
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ewadmin Aug 10, 2005 4:24 PM
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Another note from the forum administrators: We have deleted more messages in this thread (and other threads) on this forum that, once again, were posted by "interested" parties.

I think our loyal customers can see that we obviously do not censor independent discussion. I would encourage our active users to post any comments and concerns here, since Agilent is definitely watching this forum. Are there any current Eagleware practices that you would like to be sure are continued? The GENESYS R&D team is of course staying intact, so are there positive attributes of Agilent that the GENESYS team should learn from? And to any ADS users reading this forum, what about the reverse, are there attributes of GENESYS that you would like the Agilent team to learn from?

Eagleware Customer Success Group
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jross Sep 2, 2005 12:29 AM
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From a user's point of view I feel disappointed and worried by the takeover.

I have been an Eagleware (Superstar) user since 1990 and this product has been fantastic throughtout this time. The interface has been designed and developed by real engineers who use it for real design work every day (or so it seems to me).

I have lost count the number of times I have reached for the Eagleware dongle when a design crisis hits. The last thing you need at such times is a poor user interface which all the competition suffer from. Unlike other RF suites, Eagleware allows me to quickly bash in a simulation and try a few things within seconds.

I am worried that this excellent product will effectively drift away in the coming years under the ownership of Agilent.

I also worry about the future maintenance costs (we have over 6 seats here) and that the quality of the support over here in the UK may suffer.

If the maintenance costs do become too high, will we still get annual keycodes free under Agilent? I do hope so.
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ABOMPA Sep 14, 2005 4:41 AM
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I heard this rumor on another website and recently confirmed it. AWR is offering a 1 to 1 exhange for Eagleware users. They apparently are willing to trade keys, theirs for ours, for free. Just wondering if Eagleware is aware of this? I know they did this with ADS licenses, but there was always a premium involved. Thought it was important that someone in Eagleware should know.

PS: I declined their offer.
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ROB_LEFEBVRE Sep 14, 2005 7:31 AM
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Thanks for the heads up, and, yes, we keep a pretty close eye on that sort of thing. Competitive trade-in programs are not new, and are offered by just about all EDA companies. They are just not normally advertised so prominently on the front of a company web site.

In response to Jeremy, I wanted to point out that we had a webinar yesterday to address most of those kinds of concerns. A recording is expected to be posted on the web site shortly. In summary, prices are not going up. In some cases (such as non-USA customers), prices are actually going down as a result cost-savings due to a more efficient Agilent sales channel. GENESYS will continue to be the price-performance and ease-of-use leader, while ADS will be the technology leader. We do not want to exit that market space or attempt to combat ADS head-on on technology (why would we want to do that????), so raising the price of GENESYS makes no sense whatsoever for us.

I've personally been talking with the support managers here at Agilent, and the good news is that we are going to be able to INCREASE the level of support by taking advantage of Agilent's world-class organization, while still retaining all of the existing Eagleware-Elanix support engineers.

Also, ALL of the Eagleware-Elanix R&D staff are now working for Agilent and will continue working on the GENESYS/SystemVue product lines, but with access to Agilent technology and models. We've already done some of that, by replacing the MOS1/2/3 and BSIM1/2/3 models in GENESYS (which were our weakest models) with the ADS code. We would never have been able to rework those models before, so this type of thing is an immediate benefit.

Rob Lefebvre
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