I got an interesting phone call yesterday from a small EDA vendor.  It was
odd at first.  The caller was pissed about what he saw on the map of the
upcoming DAC Exhibit Hall.  Here's its floorplan:

              http://www.dac.com/43rd/PDFs/43Floorplan.pdf

If you look, you'll notice that practically all of the EDA vendors have areas
shaded off in their booths -- this shaded off part is their private suite
space behind a 10 foot wall -- the white space is their open exhibit area
where glitzy signs & fast talking salesdroids try to entice you into going
into their private suite area.  Fair enough; that's how DAC is supposed to
work.  But look to the center left of this DAC Exhibit Hall floorplan and
you'll notice that Cadence HAS NO PRIVATE SUITE AREA.

It got me curious, so I started sniffing around.

Long story short, Cadence has rented the San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel
(which is only 2 blocks away from the DAC Moscone Center) and Cadence just
"happens" to be doing a "Technology On Tour" show right there on DAC Monday
and DAC Tuesday.  This isn't a few Cadence sales guys getting together for
casual drinks at the nearby Motel 6 -- it's a swank wholesale 2-day gilded
cage kidnapping of the EDA users right off the DAC floor!  Whoa!

"And what's wrong with Cadence treating us users nicely, John?", you ask.

My answer is that it mucks up how DAC works.  To me, DAC is one of the few
times of the year when you can get some serious comparitive EDA shopping done
in very little time.  For example, let's say I'm in the market for, say...
a hardware accelerator box.

Without DAC, I'm stuck calling all the accelerator vendors (which chows time)
and then they weasil their way into visiting my office (which chows time) and
then they hustle me -- and later hustle my boss (which chows even more time
when I have to talk the boss down from the sale).  So on a per-vendor basis,
I'll probably spend 1 to 2 days of my time.  With 7 noteworthy accelerators
out there, that's a total of 7-to-14 working days just to get this info.

So to save time, I instead do a couple of web searches and limit my talks to
only the 2 or 3 of the best known accelerator boxes.


Now let's look at accelerators with DAC.  Because they're all under one roof,
I can easily go from booth to booth looking at:

  Cadence Palladium & Verisity Axis, Mentor IKOS/Celaro/Vstation, EVE ZeBu,
  Tharas Hammer, Aptix Explorer, Aldec Riviera-IPT, ProDesign, and Hardi

in one afternoon!  What's better is they don't get my boss's name, so I don't
have to deal with them selling to him behind my back -- plus I can talk to
the other accelerator *users* right there at DAC to get the inside story of
what's real and what's bullshit -- plus I can go back and forth between the
rival accelerator *vendors* to see what they have to say about each *other's*
claims -- plus I can even look at possible accelerator alternatives like
Carbon Design, Forte, and Catapult C while I'm there on the DAC floor.

But this only works because everyone's equally accessible by foot all on
that one DAC floor.

It all falls apart when Cadence woos me away with fancy food, French maids,
and the V.I.P. treatment at a world class 5 star hotel that's AWAY FROM the
DAC floor.  "Would you like a 'happy ending' with that, sir?" translates
user action to "OK, so maybe I'll just look at Cadence, Mentor, and possibly
the EVE stuff.  I don't have any time left to look at anything else."


Other than trying to slightly beef up sales, I can't exactly figure out why
Cadence is paying big bucks to steal the audience off the DAC floor.  The
big boys like Synopsys/Mentor/Magma each have 1,000 man walking, talking
armies of AEs, FAEs, and salesdroids who visit the users daily -- so they're
immune to such slick Cadence sales tactics.  This distraction strategy only
denies the small guys like Tharas, ProDesign, EVE, Aptix, Aldec, Hardi,
Carbon Design, and Forte easy access to the DAC customers.  Huh?

Is Cadence that threatened by the small EDA companies now?