Can Oracle Shake the CAD Visualization Market?

Two days ago, on May 15, Oracle (ORCL) announced the acquisition of Agile (AGIL), a company known mostly for its PLM products, for $495 million. I don’t want to discuss the impact of Oracle in the PLM market here. If you're interested you can find more detail at PC World, LinuxWorld, eWeek, Roy Wildeman, Ralph Grabowski's blog, and S. Sadagopan's blog.

What intrigues me is the impact of this acquisition on the CAD visualization market. Agile purchased Cimmetry, the well known CAD visualization company, in February 2005 for $45M cash. And now (through Agile) Oracle owns the AutoVue product line.

Agile is not exactly an example of a successful company. According to Yahoo Finance, they haven't managed to make a profit in the last 3 years. There are also rumors that the Cimmetry acquisition has not been very successful despite the fact that Cimmetry was a fully profitable and established company.

With the appearance of Oracle the landscape of CAD data visualization is changing one more time. It is too early to say what Larry Ellison’s strategy will be, but the main question is: Can a corporation-oriented company such as Oracle foster the end-user product-line of Cimmetry?

The CAD visualization market is going through a series of important changes. With Adobe recently entering this arena with Acrobat 3D, and now Oracle with Cimmetry, I see opportunities and risks on the horizon.

CAD visualization can find the place it deserves on every desktop of every manufacturing company

The main opportunity is for the entire CAD visualization market to mature and reach its potential of millions of users. CAD visualization software can find the place it deserves on every desktop of every manufacturing company. This can generate important business opportunities even for small companies such as Actify.
The risk is that the small software companies will be pushed out of the market by the competition between the two big players. Rivalry between the two giants could drive the prices down to a level that would not be profitable for small software manufacturers.

Franco Folini

Note: Larry Ellison picture is from Gaspar Torriero blog, the composition with AutoVue box is mine.

Comments

[Mike Keffer]

I agree with David that any potential value to Oracle lies in Cimmetry's core IP, that is, the native file format filters that Cimmetry possesses spanning 2D CAD, 3D CAD, documents etc.

However, we should take into account Adobe's potentially comparable technology to Cimmetry as a result of Adobe's acquisition of TTF. And Oracle's increasingly close relationship with Adobe in the past year.

In addition, there's the sense that continuing to decode and decrypt CAD formats, as Cimmetry does all in-house, is becoming increasingly difficult as the CAD vendors tighten the lock on their formats. Basically does Oracle want to stay in this game of decoding CAD formats and is the cost-benefit worth it versus partnering with Adobe for it?

Now Autodesk has acquired Navisworks (another collaborative 3D visualization player, and a good one at that) for $25 million in cash.

Maybe we've come to the point where the big gorillas, be it CAD or document publishing companies, have taken back the "viewer" market from the independents, and Oracle just may not want to position itself in the viewer market.

[Donato Mangialardo]

mhh Interesting discussion. I agree with David that Cimmetry might be helpful within Oracle/Agile PLM. But I don't believe that owning a viewer technology is an absolute must. PLM products that well integrate with the MCAD/EDA authoring tool distribution formats (or other formats, see Adobe, Actify, Seemage etc) work very well and keep things simple. I don't believe in the all-encompassing (endless scope) PLM

Anyway, as far as Oracle, I seriously doubt they will keep any focus on Cimmetry's OEM deals with competitors and especially the standalone viewer business that is dead flat anyway. Oracle is too big of a company to focus on anything else (they were not even focusing on PLM since last week...).

And, I disagree on the fact that there is no independent PLM company of worthy note. Software as a Service (Saas) is a clear shiny and rising star in enterprise software; who is ready to deliver PLM with that model (which is, Arena PLM) is clearly emerging, just like Salesforce.com did for CRM. But this is another topic ...

[Alberto Savelli]

Hi all.

I must admit that my post was a little bit provocative. Your point does make sense: the viewer is needed for a PLM product. So the question is: will Oracle push their PLM against CAD author's ones?
And: will Oracle be able to push AutoVUE as stand alone viewer? I still think not. I guess Adobe is more interested in this business.

[David Opsahl]

Gentlemen,

A couple of thoughts.

Oracle will NOT throw Cimmetry away. To the contrary, Oracle desperately needs Cimmetry technology (as opposed to Cimmetry business) if it intends to be successful in PLM/PDM, which clearly it does (otherwise, its a waste of $495M). Looking at the market now, there is no indepedent PLM company of worthy note and all of the primary products on the market has its own embedded viewer. That is no co-incidence.

Moreover, AutoVuew is a perfect fit. It is the best multi-platform viewer out there, and Oracle needs to remain multi-platform. The CADView3D product is NOT an in-house Oracle development; it was technology acquired from Assentive Solutions (formerly Adaptive Media) several years back, is primarily streaming-based, and is unsuitable for mainstream manufacturing (was more targeted towards the Plant Design/AEC markets, which is where Oracle's PLM product was originally targeted at the time of the acquisition).

I would submit this is a technology acquistion (certainly from the Cimmetry perspective) not a business acquisition. As I understand it, the bulk of Cimmetry's revenues came from OEM contracts to competitors, not from end user sales. If true, then this would explain the difficulty Agile has had, and I would assume Oracle would have discounted this in valuing the transaction.

It is indeed getting interesting.

[Bachir Bounab]

Hi Alberto,

Why do you think that Oracle will sell Cimmetry?! Oracle are positionning themselves in the PLM market and they need a viewer to integrate to their products. They need AutoVue at least for that. They had even developed their own viewer CADView 3D which is not comparable to AutoVue.
I guess, they will at least integrate AutoVue, which is the best viewer on the market, to their product line.
Now, whether Orcale will continue to sell AutoVue stand alone, that's not clear. My guess is Yes. AutoVue does integrate SAP and other Orcale's competitors that Oracle will like to penetrate.

[Donato Mangialardo]

I cannot see how Oracle might be interested in Cimmetry. Beated up and upset for the recent, major debacle of his toy in the America's cup, Larry Ellison comes back home and finds this new company, which includes a number of products, based on at least 5 code bases (Agile 9.2, Prodika, Agile Advantage (a branch of 8.5), Cimmetry and the automotive PLM/Supply chain Software, whose name I cannot remember). On top of that, Cimmetry has a completely different technology/platform/businsss.

What he's going to do? Probably just some math.

If I were a Cimmetry user, I would be very nervous

[Franco Folini]

Alberto,
Selling Cimmetry could be an interesting option!
Cimmetry is currently suffering because of the acquisition by Agile. The main part of their business is with OEMs. Becoming part of Agile they lost the privileged status of neutrality. Many OEMs don't like using a technology (AutoVue) that is fully controlled by one of their competitors (Agile). Selling Cimmetry or making it an independent spin-off, could really revitalize the visualization company.

Franco

[Alberto Savelli]

Hello Franco.
I see also another possibility: Oracle will throw away Cimmetry, since it is something that is too far from their traditional business.
What do you think?

bye