Cadence Takes a Page Out of Microsoft’s Playbook

With the Microsoft-Yahoo! drama fresh on everyone’s mind, Mike Fister and the Cadence board have finally done something that shows a bit of boldness, some imagination, and possibly some courage. Cadence has made a hostile takeover bid for Mentor Graphics.

Cadence Languishes On

Cadence, (Nasdaq: CDNS) continued to be bothered with the woes of the EDA industry. Q1 results reported last week saw the quarter’s revenue drop by 21% annually and and 37% sequentially to $287 million. However, the revenue still beat market expectations of $285 million. EPS for Q1 met analyst expectation of $0.04, recording a fall

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Cadence: Buyout Rumors Persist

I have regularly commented on the EDA industry and discussed specific companies in the past, including Cadence, Mentor, Magma, and Synopsys. Today I come back to look at Cadence again, and examine what has changed since. During the summer Cadence (CDNS) was rumored to be in buyout discussions with Blackstone and KKR, which I said

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 10)

SM: What kinds of problems have you identified as big open problems you are going to tackle in the labs? TL: We are always working on making the service faster, scalable and more reliable. We have a team of folks that are looking for the 1 in 10,000 to the 1 in 100,000 “nasty thing”

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 9)

SM: One of the concerns you must be facing now is how big can the CDN business be, and how fast can it grow? I am sure your investors like to see diversification as it is both risk and business diversification. Application acceleration provides that diversification, and I like it. TL: We consider it to

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 8)

SM: How do you provide fast, reliable service globally? What is the secret there? TL: There are a bunch of things we do for that. In the old adage, having our servers near the end users rewards them. We sit on top of and find better routes on the Internet. We don’t change the protocol,

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 7)

SM: This is a really big problem. How close to the last mile can you get? You are going to need millions of servers to cover the world. TL: I don’t think so. The way we think, a server can serve a gigabit a second. It is pretty economical. If you look at TV quality,

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 5)

SM: Let’s take that question and apply it to all these recent media reactions you are getting about Level 3’s announcement that CDN is going to be a commodity and all these telcos are going to provide CDNs. [My previous coverage here.] TL: I think the Telcos have always provided CDN. There has been no

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