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Posts Tagged ‘Jasper Design Automation’

Calling Srivastava, Madhavan, Rowen, Kranen: ESDA needs you on November 1st

Thursday, October 13th, 2016

 


Congrats to the ESD Alliance for continuing
to attend to myriad legal issues that surround the business of technology. On Tuesday, November 1st, the organization is hosting an evening panel on the Cadence campus entitled “Legal Steps to Maximize Your Exit Value.”

Vital topics slated for discussion include setting the proper price for intangible assets – in-house IP, strategic partnerships, and good will – and more prosaic issues such as the appropriate legal structures and pre-deal tax planning needed to help facilitate the acquisition. Most importantly, panel organizers are also promising you’ll learn “how to avoid giving it all back to your buyer later”.

Which is where our EDA M&A Hall of Fame comes in. There’s just no way this ESD Alliance panel can carry any weight with a battle-hardened EDA audience without the likes of Sanjay Srivastava, Rajeev Madhavan, Chris Rowen, and Kathryn Kranen sitting up at the front of the room.

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Swan Song: Kranen bids Adieu to EDA

Wednesday, October 8th, 2014

 

Exhibiting that unique combo of energy, hubris, and eloquence that’s the hallmark of Silicon Valley CEOs everywhere, Kathryn Kranen bid adieu to the EDA industry tonight. Sitting on the Cadence stage in conversation with Vista Ventures’ Jim Hogan – an event billed as part of EDAC’s ongoing Emerging Companies Series – Kranen walked the audience through highlights of her career, with special emphasis on the last 11 years serving as CEO at Jasper, a company she sold to Cadence earlier this year for a reported price of $174 million.

Up until the end of the evening, the exchange between these seasoned veterans of EDA proceeded as advertised – full of pithy advice on starting up startups, as well as enthusiastic endorsements of opportunities in the industry and good-natured banter between two highly successful people who know what it takes to grow and sell a company in high-tech. In the end, however, the evening turned out to be far, far more. It turned out to be Kathryn Kranen’s swan song in EDA.

Toward the end of her 90-minute interview with Hogan, things went historic when Kranen offered not only that she’s leaving Cadence just 4 months after the Jasper acquisition, but she’s leaving EDA completely. According to Kranen, she wants to serve at a company in the size range of Jasper, 100 to 150 employees, but enterprises of that scale are almost impossible to assemble these days in EDA. Since she wants to lead a moderately-sized company, but those options are not available here, she’s looking instead for opportunities outside the industry.

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M&A: It’s Jasper to Cadence, at last …

Monday, April 21st, 2014

 

In the moments prior to Cadence’s quarterly earnings call this afternoon, the company released news of the acquisition of Jasper Design Automation for $170 million, less $24 million in cash, and a small tremor rippled out across the EDA Nation.

Paraphrasing Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan in the early minutes of his 5pm ET earnings call: We are very pleased to announce a definitive agreement to acquire Jasper Design Automation. This will help us to further meet our customers’ needs for more advanced verification solutions, particularly today as verification now represents 70% of the cost of SoC development. Together, Cadence and Jasper can move forward, offering the strong formal verification solutions leading customers need. In addition, Cadence is also very pleased to be bringing on board the strong team at Jasper, a team with excellent real-world experience.

All good stuff, yes? So why any tremors in our beloved little EDA Nation?

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Jasper DA: What the Future Holds

Thursday, December 12th, 2013

 

At a recent tech conference in Silicon Valley, I had a chat with a long-time EDA player; let’s call him Elmer. The conversation came around to Jasper Design Automation and conjectures as to what’s ahead for the company. I recounted a small compare and contrast.

At the 2008 February EDAC CEO Forecast Panel, Jasper CEO Kathryn Kranen was on stage along with Synopsys CEO Aart de Geus, Mentor CEO Wally Rhines, and then-Cadence CEO Mike Fister. During the panel discussion, Kranen criticized the Big EDA companies on the panel for their ‘all you can eat’ business strategies – the big companies providing less-than-best-in-class point tools for free to customers who purchased their anchor products, which Kranen said made it nearly impossible for the smaller companies to compete.

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Career Girls: Does anyone really know what time it is?

Thursday, December 12th, 2013

 

Last week, I had a chance to interview the founder of Career Girls, a YouTube channel chock-a-block with 220+ video interviews of successful women talking about how they got started in their careers, what educational background they needed for those careers, and what features and/or people in their lives helped to bring them to where they are today.

All good stuff, but then this week Mary Barra was named CEO of GM – yeah, yeah, you’ve already heard – the first woman CEO of a major American automobile manufacturer. Outgoing CEO Dan Akerson is quoted as saying, “Mary was not picked because of her gender or political correctness, [but because] Mary’s one of the most gifted executives I’ve met in my career.”

So, it’s a meritocracy after all? If that’s the case here in 2013, do we actually still need something like CareerGirls.org to encourage our daughters to be all they can be? Well, despite Detroit’s Mary Barra, and the likes of Meg Whitman, Marissa Meyer, and Sheryl Sandberg here in Silicon Valley, there are still, according to some studies, very few women anywhere near to the top in big business. And we need look no farther than EDA to prove it … again.

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Good times: EDAC says Q1_2013 a solid success

Wednesday, August 7th, 2013

 

Well, it looks like the industry has done it again, delivering good growth over a recent quarter. The Press Release issued by EDAC’s Market Statistics Service on August 6th detailed the numbers for Q1_2013: 8.1% growth overall, including 23.8% growth in Services, 20.2% growth in IP, and (a bit less glam) 2.4% growth in EDA. Interesting.

Meanwhile, Dr. Wally Rhines continues to contribute to the industry by making himself available for conversation about the MSS numbers as they are released each period, clarifying as always that his comments are on behalf of EDAC and do not reflect his role as CEO of Mentor Graphics. When I spoke by phone with Rhines earlier this week, I asked him if we can anticipate industry results for all of 2013 by looking at the Q1 numbers.

He said no, EDAC numbers do not portend the future, they only aggregate the results from the past. To know more about the future of the industry, Rhines referred me to the four visionary keynotes given at DAC by Synopsys’ Aart de Geus, Cadence’s Lip-Bu Tan, Jasper’s Kathryn Kranen and Rhines’ own talk.

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DAC 2013: a Taste of Texas

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

 

Surely EDA is a serious-minded industry, particularly when it comes to ramping up for the annual Design Automation Conference where it’s all work and no play. Nonetheless, sometimes it just has to be okay to relax a little and hence the spirit of this blog.

Thanks to native Texans Sonia Harrison and Kathryn Kranen of Mentor Graphics and Jasper Design Automation, respectively, as well as my vintage copy of the Tasting Bee cookbook from the University of Texas San Antonio Health Science Center, herein are included some mighty fine recipes – Calabazita, Migas, Golden Potato Casserole, Texas Chili, and a refreshing chaser – to try out and enjoy over the next few weeks as the 50th DAC draws near and the Lone Star State beckons.

Bon Appetit, y’all!

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EDAC CEO Panel: Practically perfection

Thursday, March 14th, 2013

 

From the podium in San Jose’s DoubleTree Hotel, Jasper Design Automation President & CEO Kathryn Kranen introduced tonight’s EDAC CEO Forecast Event as being “practically perfection” and she was right. With 97 people in the room, the event ran for 97 minutes and the audience [undoubtedly] gave the panel discussion a 97% approval rating. Kudos to all involved, including EDAC for hosting, and OCP-IP, Mod Marketing, and the DoubleTree for sponsoring the event.

Kranen started off the evening by bragging on good news out of EDA: It’s up and to the right for revenue in the industry, with a 4.9 percent increase between 3Q11 and 3Q12. She cited increased stock valuations over the last year for ARM [37%], Cadence [30%], Mentor [26%], PDF Solutions [98%], and Synopsys [17%] as an indication of the viability of EDA as an investment vehicle: If you’d put $100 into each of these companies a year ago, she said, you would have netted a 41% increase in a portfolio today worth $706.90, beating out other investment indices such as the NASDAQ and S&P 100 over the same time period.

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Kathryn Kranen: the paradigm shifts at EDAC

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

 

Stop the presses! Someone other than the CEO of Mentor, Synopsys, or Cadence is going to be the Chair of EDAC.

What? Has the world come to an end?

Nope, but it turns out that even staid EDAC has, at last, learned how to innovate. It turns out that Mentor, Synopsys, and Cadence have, at least, seen the light and decided that they shouldn’t always be at the head of the class. As of yesterday, May 31st, there’s a new Chair at EDAC and it’s Kathryn Kranen, President & CEO at Jasper Design Automation.

Kathryn, of course, is well known within the EDA community. She’s been CEO at Jasper since 2003. Prior to Jasper, Kathryn was CEO of Verisity Design, and earlier on served as VP of North American sales at Quickturn. At the outset of her career, after earning a BSEE at Texas A&M, she worked as a design engineer at Rockwell, and then joined Daisy Systems in advance of her role at Quickturn.

In addition, Kathryn was named the 2005 recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Woman in EDA Achievement Award, and has been an extremely hard working member of the Board of Directors of EDAC for many years.

I am personally elated at the news, and wish Kathryn all the best!

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