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30 The PCB Design Magazine • December 2016 The high prices that the industry enjoyed in its early days began to fall, causing much concern among software vendors because the profit margin per sale was slipping. In our re- placement market, this is very concerning, be- cause the only way to make up for this profit is to bring in a large amount of new sales at this lower price. Volume sales suddenly became the rule, in a market that isn't exactly growing in leaps and bounds. The New Normal So here we are now. We are suffering from an ever-widening gap between the high-end design software used to push the envelope of the EDA industry, and the lower-to-middle end-market of designers who are trying to keep up with market demands for electronic products. EDA software companies are trying to diversify their offerings to make up for lost profits, and the nature of the business has become much more complex. The complexity lies here: All the software vendors' design tools can take a board design from conception to manufacture. But each ven- dor provides its own set of unique strengths or weaknesses that make it either perfect for one company's flavor of designs, or not so perfect. There is also the question of time-to-market ver- sus cost of time-to-market. Engineering managers often overlook one aspect of cost: They try to save money with a $10,000 seat of design software, but they often wind up paying a designer four times that in man-hours spent using software that lacks func- tionality. After paying the designer for his time, you still wonder if this budget software caught all of the manufacturing defects. But if you pay $25,000 for a seat of software for that PCB de- signer to produce a design in half the time, with fewer headaches and a greater likelihood of zero design defects, the money spent up front often pays for itself many times over. This fact is often lost on engineering man- agers because of that age-old problem: There is a disconnect between what designers want and what their managers give them. Where Are We Now? It's a difficult market out there for EDA soft- ware vendors. It's glutted with some great play- ers. This means that it's a great time for PCB designers and engineers. Picking and choos- ing among EDA software vendors to find just the right mix is creating a shift away from the single vendor solution that was so important not too long ago. If one designer can cut design time in half or more by using a software appli- cation that he knows inside and out, managers today seem more willing to allow him to use that application instead of the tool that compa- ny standard dictate. This means good things for software vendors too, because one vendor's win doesn't necessarily mean that another vendor is entirely shut out from use by that design group. These trends and changes are certainly impor- tant, but it can also be argued that not a whole lot has changed. The bottom line is that PCB design- ers want their lives to be easier when it comes to laying out a board. An entire industr y of software developers is working as hard as they can to pro- vide easier, faster ways to do just that. It won't be a surprise if new competitor joins the marketplace, or if some older competitor dies a slow death. From our perspective looking back over time, we can understand that this is really just another part of the cycle of selling and market- ing EDA tools. PCBDESIGN Abby Monaco, CID, is a product manager for Intercept Technology Inc. With more than 13 years of experience in EDA, Abby is actively involved in technical product plan- ning and direction, and marketing. HOW SELLING EDA SOFTWARE HAS CHANGED…OR NOT " EDA software companies are trying to diversify their offerings to make up for lost profits, and the nature of the business has become much more complex. "