What's the New CMO Mean For Cadence and System Design and Verification?

If you track Cadence stock or other EDA leadership news you undoubtedly know we've hired John Bruggeman as our new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Vice President of Marketing. He's been part of some very dynamic companies, and most recently with Wind River, whose sale to Intel led to eventual arrival at Cadence. Given his recent experience with embedded software at Wind River, one might surmise that Cadence will "do something spectacular" in embedded software.

John popped out a blog today that describes his joining of Cadence, and how EDA has an opportunity to provide significant value to our customers by leading through several important changes in the industry.

One of those changes is the growing importance of software. The growth of FPGAs versus ASICs were driven partly by cost economics, but also by schedule availability for software. The emergence of virtual platforms and transaction level modeling for design and verification are also trends that result from the dominance of software in our industry.

One of the briefly mentioned points in John's blog is about the economic structure changes in our customer base. Not only is software driving design, but software is driving corporate structure and core competence development. This translates into higher numbers of engineers working on software than on hardware, as well as changing economic relationships between customers. The Apple iPhone breakdown shows not only the silicon eco-system, but it highlights how many companies provide the software that enables hand-held web browsing, music distribution, and play-by-play sports updates (my favorite!).

As John states, these changes present challenges for our customers to manage profitably, and opportunities for Cadence to innovate solutions that facilitate the new way of designing systems. And that's why I like my job, the outlook for Cadence, and the influence John is having internally and in the industry.

Steve Brown