> From: Mike O'Reilly <moreilly=user domain=optomec.com>
>
> Hi, John,
> 
> I'm sure you've heard about the recent Cadence layoff.  Some long time
> senior employees were taken out.  In the midst of their management
> meltdown, they their lost technology leadership, and their customer
> support is eroding.  One would think that talented, senior engineers
> would be the ones to keep... not their weak marketing team.
>
> While I have defended Cadence vigorously in the past, they have gone
> beyond any sense of reason with these management hires and technology
> savvy people layoffs.  As you so aptly put, they need a CEO who is an
> EDA veteran and has both sound technical and business skills.
>
> Can you skewer these guys some more please?
>
>     - Mike O'Reilly
>       Optomec, Inc.                            Albuquerque, NM


From: John Cooley <jcooley=user domain=zeroskew.com>

Hi, Mike,

I think we're in violent agreement here.

Although I jokingly volunteered to replace Fister myself, like you I feel
what's important for Cadence is to have a CEO who *knows* the EDA industry.
That is, it's critical that he/she NOT be brought in from outside EDA.

I feel that any of these following people from the Big Four would be
qualified to restore Cadence back to its olde glory days:

From Cadence:     Ted Vucurevich, current Cadence CTO
                  Chi-Ping Hsu, current SVP Cadence R&D
                  Charlie Huang, current SVP Cadence Biz Dev
                  Jim Hogan, former Cadence board member
                  Penny Hersher, former Cadence bigwig
                  Jim Solomon, Cadence founder
                  Joe Costello, former Cadence CEO
                  Lucio Lanza, former Cadence M&A guy
                  Atul Sharan, current ClearShape CEO
                  Jan Willis, former Cadence VP of Marketing
                  Eric Filseth, current CEO of Ciranova

From Synopsys:    Antun Domic, current SVP Synopsys P&R
                  Gary Meyers, current Synplicity CEO
                  Deirdre Hanford, current SVP Synopsys Support
                  Paul Lo, current SVP Synopsys AMS
                  Manoj Gandhi, current SVP Synopsys VCS

From Mentor:      Joe Sawicki, current GM of Mentor DFM
                  Simon Bloch, current GM of Mentor C & FPGA
                  Eric Selosse, current GM of Mentor Emulation
                  Pravin Madhani, current Sierra CEO

From Magma:       Suk Lee, current GM of Magma Custom Design
                  Premal Buch, current GM of Magma P&R
                  Anirudh Devgan, current GM of Magma Custom Design

I excluded the CEOs and presidents of the Big Four (like Wally and Rajeev)
because I don't think any of them would do a lateral move to Cadence.

And from the EDA start-ups, any of these guys would be good:

                  Sanjay Srivastava, current CEO of Denali
                  Andrew Yang, current CEO of Apache
                  Vic Kulkarni, current CEO of Sequence
                  Mike Gianfagna, current VP at Atrenta
                  Venk Shukla, current CEO of Nusym
                  John Sanguinetti, current CTO at Forte
                  Ajoy Bose, current CEO of Atrenta
                  John Tanner, current CEO of Tanner EDA
                  Dean Drako, current CEO of IC Manage
                  John Kibarian, current CEO of PDF
                  David Burow, current CEO of Agility
                  Lauro Rizzatti, current GM at EVE
                  Eric Thune, current VP at AtopTech
                  Keith Mueller, former VP at Apache
                  Prakash Narain, current CEO of Real Intent
                  Paul Estrada, current COO of Berkeley
                  Jacob Jacobsson, current CEO of Blaze DFM
                  Kathryn Kranen, current CEO of Jasper
                  Paul de Dood, current CEO of Prolific
                  Simon Napper, current CEO of Synfora
                  Michiel Ligthart, current COO of Verific
                  Raul Camposano, current CEO of Xoomsys
                  Isadore Katz, current CEO of CLK-EDA
                  Dave Kelf, current CEO of Sigmatix

I'm seriously afraid that the Cadence CEO Selection Committee will get
caught up in trying to bag some "big name" clown who comes from a "big
name" company that Wall Street likes.  That they'll try to pawn off some
EDA novice from Freescale, or K-Mart, or Pepsi, or Sun, or Boeing, or
Microsoft, or Motel 6, or Broadcom as the new Cadence CEO.  They tried
that twice before.  It doesn't work.  Each time things only got worse!

All Cadence needs is an EDA VETERAN who has the *EDA* common sense to make
the right *EDA* decisions to revitalize Cadence.  (And if need be, he/she
can learn leadership skills OJT -- just like how Aart did at Synopsys.)

Cadence is screwed if they put in a third EDA newbie from a nice "big name"
company as CEO.  There's too many tricky *EDA* decisions he/she has to make
correctly now -- and *EDA* newbie mistakes can be particularly fatal now.

I wonder if this message will even get through to the people inside Cadence
who are choosing their next CEO.  Here's to hoping.

    - John Cooley
      DeepChip.com