BANGALORE, India — Responding to harsh criticism touched off by the departure of senior executives, the chief technology officer of Cadence Design Systems Inc. dismissed calls to spin off parts of the EDA company.
"I completely dismiss the notion that you sell off your core competency areas in technology and become a pure integrator at the higher level," Cadence CTO Ted Vucurevich said in an interview here. "Will Cadence be half its size in the future? No."
Speaking here following a company event, Vucurevich acknowledged that it was probably time for CEO Michael Fister and other senior executives to go, but disputed that they were among the company's key assets.
In an interview, Vucurevich specifically rejected calls by some critics to sell off parts of the company's product offerings like IC CAD tools. He also dismissed critics who asserted that Cadence should seek to reinvent itself as a smaller company.
The company's product portfolio is strong enough to carry it through the executive transition, and critics who assert that Cadence is losing market share are wrong, Vucurevich said. He argued that Cadence is in the midst of a transition similar to those faced by EDA competitors.
"I would caution that the analysts, particularly in today's kind of market, take a raw assessment of a technology and distort it dramatically," he said. "If you have an a la carte view of the company's product portfolio, I agree that some parts may need to be strengthened. But, from a pure technology perspective, I will stand by any technology assessment anyone wants to do on our portfolio. And I will certainly not claim that it is perfect."
The broader issue for Cadence is how to integrate its offering into an effective solution, Vucurevich continued. "Our verification and custom platforms are in very good shape, and our digital platform will take time to integrate and mature. But these take a cycle time. If you look at the rate of convergence, particularly in the digital side, we are fixing things.
"We have taken some flak for having left the [electronic system-level] space, but we are coming back into it. I am very excited about the technology pipeline now that our platforms are more stable than in the past. So we are going to move products into the market at a much faster pace," Vucurevich said.
The Cadence executive declined to comment on reports of impending layoffs at Cadence, saying more details of the executive transition will be announced next week when quarterly financial results are released.
EE Times had originally been scheduled to interview outgoing Cadence CEO Michael Fister during the company's user group meeting here. Instead, Cadence made Vucurevich available as the ranking executive here following Fister's sudden resignation.
—K.C. Krishnadas is editor of TechOnlineIndia.com
