Flomerics/Autodesk Merger???

Always interesting to see when news of a merger is "leaked" to the press.

Not sure how much merit to give this news or if it is similar hype to Yahoo/Microsoft debacle? Obviously, not on the same scale.

But in my world, it is actually much bigger news. Always trying to look at things from every angle, I am trying to figure this one out.

So, Autodesk's claim is to be the father of Digital Prototyping. With their acquisition of Alias on the design side and then Plassotech on the analysis side, I can see a common theme. They seem to be building momentum. So far so good.

Then there was the recent announcement that they were purchasing Moldflow??! A bit of a stretch as Moldflow is a pretty sophisticated analyst type tool. But, I have always felt that if done properly, Moldflow could be put in the hands of the design community. Always a difficult task when you have a "big boy" product that is priced fairly high, the tendency is to develop an "Express" tool to tease the user base. Exactly what has happened there.

So at least it appears as though Autodesk is not only jumping into the analysis business, but they are trying to make a big leap. Pretty tall task. They are trying to convert some of their AutoCAD customers to Inventor, but they are now exposing them to some specialist type of analysis tool. AND, they sell majority of their products through a reseller network. What SolidWorks did with COSMOS seemed unheard of at the time, but they seemed to do a great job. But, what COSMOS does and what Moldflow/Flomerics do are drastically different. Not sure it would be possible to push these products through a channel?

Continuing with that theme, we now see that Autodesk is entertaining the idea of acquiring Flomerics. Trying to be open minded here, but I am searching for the logic. Ok, so historically, Flomerics has had tools (Flotherm, Flovent etc) that were geared almost strictly for the analyst-only community. They acquired NIKA to give themselves some exposure to the design community. NIKA has modules that are geared toward Pro/e, SolidWorks and Catia V5 users. They also have a general module for everyone else. The general module uses SolidWorks on the front-end...! Hmmm.. So, where does the Flomerics "solution" fit in with Autodesk's grand scheme. I am obviously not privy to the logic, but seems like a cluster to me.

Anyway, all this merger stuff is great fun to watch.