OrCAD and Allegro PCB design technologies, Clarity/Sigrity/Celsius system analysis technologies, and Fidelity CFD software are now available from a SaaS platform, through a consumption-based pricing model
Ease of purchase is undoubtedly one of the reasons for success of many consumer-oriented services provided through the Internet: just type a card number, freely select a quantity or a subscription duration, and you immediately get what you want. With EDA technologies now available through cloud computing platforms, this ease of purchase can also be extended to the use of EDA tools – adding to the main benefit of a Software-as-a-Service model: eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure hardware. These, in short, are the concepts behind OnCloud, the new Cadence e-commerce platform for cloud-based system design and analysis. With OnCloud, the ease of purchase enabled by e-commerce is leveraged to address two types of customer needs: on the one hand, making it easier for the ‘long tail’ of small EDA users to access first-class technologies; on the other hand, enabling big EDA users to cope with workload peaks without purchasing additional licenses. Two Cadence executives – Ben Gu, Vice President of R&D for the Multiphysics System Analysis Business Unit, and Mahesh Turaga, Vice President of Business Development, Cloud – described the OnCloud features in the video interview they recently gave to EDACafe’s Sanjay Gangal; in this article we will add a few details, as well as the answers Turaga provided to some additional questions.
