back to article Siemens to mentor Mentor Graphics in $4.5bn acquisition

Siemens is to acquire the design automation and industrial software business Mentor Graphics in a $4.5bn deal, including debt. Mentor Graphics, which is headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon, generates annual global revenues of around $1bn off the back of its integrated circuit design automation software. Siemens reckons the …

  1. Dave 126 Silver badge

    Carl Icahn gets everywhere...

    Billionaire activist Carl Icahn won a proxy fight in 2011 that secured him three board seats, although he quit his investment in the company in April after six years. Mentor Graphics also fended off a hostile takeover by rival Cadence Design Systems Inc CDNS.N in 2008.

    - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mentor-graphics-m-a-siemens-idUSKBN1390Q4

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Missed a golden headline opportunity there:

    Siemens Spunks $4.5bn in Mentor Graphics Love in.

  3. lglethal Silver badge
    Meh

    hmmm...

    I hope that's not going to cause problems in the connectivity between CATIA and Mentor. They just started playing nice together...

  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Coat

    Will this make their PLC's more secure

    Seems Siemens have had a few problems in that area.....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Will this make their PLC's more secure

      With the greatest respect Mr Smith 19 (no, honest):

      I think most (maybe not all) of the issues with Siemens PLCs (Stuxnet etc) have actually been associated with the PC-based (Windows-based) software they have historically used both for user interfaces on PLC-based systems and for writing, testing, storing, etc programs for PLC systems. (Maybe you knew this, many others may not).

      Mentor seem to have relatively quietly built up a set of expertise related to specific embedded markets. Might be an interesting acquisition for Siemens. Hopefully better for all concerned than (say) Autonomy was for HP.

  5. phands

    I worked at Mentor for 8 years, in the good old growth days. When Wally took over, revenues were around $1Billion, and all these years later, they still are - no vision at the top. I also worked for Synopsys and Cadence - much more dynamic companies than Mentor now is. The acquisition by Siemens is the death-knell for what was a wonderful company. Siemens is a stagnant dinosaur, and the culture-fit with Mentor is negligible. Mentor will hemorrhage people now.

  6. Christian Berger

    I've worked at a Subsidary of Siemens using Mentor products

    And I have to say Nucleus (the OS developed by Mentor) is _really_ bad. You can see that somewhere in the 1990s it was made by some decently clever people, then it descended into crud. Code we paid lots of money for was not even superficially tested and apparently written by idiots. You could see the bugs in the code by simply looking at it.

    When I did some inquiries on why this was chosen over, let's say "FreeRTOS" the reply was that the decision to use Nucleus was made first, then some documents were written to claim that it's more suitable.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: I've worked at a Subsidary of Siemens using Mentor products

      Ohh I should mention that the quality of Siemens software is also not particularly good. Their spiel is to use every obscure and currently fashionable feature of Windows, from VBX components over ActiveX to .net, and to use that in the most incompetent way. It's software that does trivial things, yet legs behind even the most simplest user input.

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