> "There's a new team of analysts looking at a subset of the EDA market.
>  VDC has been covering the embedded software marketplace quite well for
>  some time and are preparing a first report on ESL.  They're doing a
>  good job, and may be interested in extending to the whole EDA range."
>
>      - Vincent Perrier, Co-Founder of CoFluent Design
>
> "At $10K we couldn't afford to buy Gary's annual report.  It's too much
>  for a start-up to pay.  Another company, VDC, just asked me for my ESL
>  data and now they want me to pay them $8K to get the same data back!
>  This doesn't work for us."
>
>      - Brett Cline, VP of Marketing at Forte
>        http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad102506.html


Looked up VDC and found it stood for "Venture Development Corporation", an
analyst company based in Massachusetts that focuses its research mostly in
the embedded systems space.  I called and asked about their supposed recent
foray in ESL.  "The way we got into this was from the many virtual systems
simulations companies popping up on our radar," said Matt Volckmann, a VDC
analyst.  "We historically really only covered embedded software tools."

From what Matt said, it looks like this ESL report that Vincent and Brett are
talking about is (so far) just a one shot deal.  "There's no guarantees; it
all depends on the future level of interest," said Volckmann.  "VDC is fairly
conservative about stepping into a new area."

"It's interesting that Gartner cut their EDA coverage.  Gary Smith was pretty
much the industry poster child for EDA and ESL," added Volckmann.  "There's
now questions about the future growth of EDA and questions about its future
areas of growth in DFM and ESL."

         ----    ----    ----    ----    ----    ----   ----

In the Replacements-For-Gary Dept, last week EETimes.com posted an ambigious
scoop that implied Jordan Selburn of iSuppli was going to now be covering
EDA, but later in the week EDN's Mike Santarini punched an embarrassing hole
in that story.

"I spoke with Jordan today and he said his new group at iSuppli is NOT going
to cover the EDA industry," wrote Mike.  "That means that EDA watchers will
have to wait to see if another market analyst firm will step up with EDA
industry coverage now that Gartner has closed down."

"We are not covering EDA, we are covering design," said Jordan Selburn in
Mike's blog.  "We are not going to be coming out with what is WindRiver's
marketshare or what is our forecast for the number of synthesis seats."

Instead it appears iSuppli will be tracking the characteristics of designs;
sort of the use of IP and IP-wannabe "parts" in current designs.  They'll be
tracking stuff like what's in a design, who's doing it, where it's being
done, and at what node it's in.  It's to answer a question like when is MP5
going to ramp? -- not who has the biggest share of the current P&R market?