Top Engineering Solution Providers

Are they headed toward NT or staying with UNIX?

A fast-growing segment of the Windows NT market isengineering solutions. Formerly restricted to UNIX platforms, this softwareindustry is rapidly adopting NT. Two years ago, no NT-native engineeringsoftware was available. Now most major developers offer NT solutions. In thattime, the NT market share in engineering has gone from zero to 5%, and thatfigure will grow by more than 50% in each coming year (and NT's total growthwill be 150% per year).

This growth is because NT offers a high-powered computing environment onless-expensive hardware than is typical of UNIX. Sun Microsystems SPARCstationsand HP 9000s go off the price scale when compared to equivalently poweredPentium Pro and Alpha workstations. (LINUX can run on low-endIntel-based systems, but these are generally not the choice for the fast-paceddesign and production of critical components: Such work requirescompute-intensive tasks such as simulation, finite element analysis, and CAD).

To see where this industry is headed, you need to break it into several keydevelopment areas: mechanical design, electronic design, architecturalengineering and construction, and analysis tools. Also, two related, if notdirectly involved, fields in engineering are scientific visualization andautomation and control.

Each development area consists of several technologies and companies withproducts aimed at specific purposes. Mechanical design includes CAD, withembedded manufacturing capabilities and solid modeling. Electronic designencompasses tools for schematic capture, IC design, circuit simulation (analogand digital), PCB layout, and prototyping (such as FPGAs), and others.Architectural engineering and construction applications provide the design,visualization, and planning of architectural systems. Analysis tools coverfinite element analysis for aeronautical, aerospace, and other mechanicalsystems. The remaining two fields, scientific visualization and automation andcontrol, involve (as their names imply) scientific data analysis andvisualization, and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) with discrete- andprocess-control products.

Now that you know how the engineering industry breaks down, you need toknow who the players are, what their products do (if they have NT-nativeversions), and how they're doing in the market. Calculating market share dependson not just the installed user base, but on the price of the software. When onelicense of an electronics design system can cost $20,000, you won't find as manyinstallations as for one costing only $2000. So, you have to look at totalrevenue, too.

The Windows NT share is growing significantly out of the new softwarerevenues for the next few years, rather than cutting into existing sales onother platforms. The Total columns show total software sales worldwide for allOSs, for all types of applications. The Windows NT columns show NT's share ofthe total market, and the UNIX column shows the corresponding UNIX share.

The total worldwide software market for 1995 (estimated, from a report byDataquest) was $89,491 million, with Windows NT accounting for $4848 million(about 5.5%). UNIX took in $17,671 million (19.7%), and Windows 3.X got thelion's share with $26,155 million (29.2%). Other operating systems (DOS,Macintosh, OS/400, etc.) make up the difference. The CAD/CAM and computer-aidedengineering (CAE) market accounted for $5,800 million (6.5% of the total market,according to a report by Daratech), with UNIX taking the leading position at$4374 million (4.9% of the global market and 75% of the CAD market), and NTclocking in at $215 million (0.3% of the global market and only 4.9% of the CADmarket).

Distilling all this gobbledygook reveals that the NT engineering market isgrowing by leaps and bounds. Although NT is not biting large pieces out of theUNIX share, NT is taking up most of the potential market growth. By theend of the century, UNIX and NT will be neck and neck (for projected values for1996 through 1998, see Graphs 1 and 2). Don't, however, make the mistake ofthinking that UNIX is disappearing. Quite the contrary: The UNIX market isgrowing substantially, at about $600 million per year (about 10% growth). TheUNIX market just isn't growing as fast (percentage-wise) as the NT segment(averaging $150 million per year; about 40%). The NT share is small now, but asusers and vendors continue to embrace this versatile OS, the numbers will shift.

Key Players and Trends
What exactly is happening in the engineering marketplace? Both theuser and vendor communities are contributing to an inexorable push toward NT.The users want NT's ease of use, power, and flexibility. The vendors want toaccommodate popular platforms while taking advantage of NT's features such assymmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) and super-fast CPUs. Vendors can port the sameNT application across multiple CPU types simply by recompiling the code. Incontrast, UNIX applications require recoding for each UNIX flavor.

NT is bringing together users and developers who, until now, have notcompeted in the same marketplace. Now you can run a $100,000 3D-CAD andmanufacturing application on the same system that a $2000 2D design package runson. This capability is an opportunity for users to transfer their expertise inone system to another as applications adopt common NT attributes.

This capability also means users will compete where they weren't before, asprices for systems and applications drop. For example, the 3D-package SoftImagedropped from $60,000 to $8000. Because of financial considerations, small designand consulting firms used to be limited to smaller, slower, or less-capabledesign systems. Such firms will now be able to afford previously monolithicsystems. CAD engineers will be able to take their experience with small systemsand apply them to the new large ones. A technical knowledge base will beavailable to these companies, allowing them to compete in the global market.

The new mix of players will also bring new ways of thinking and doing work.Hot startup companies in 3D solid modeling and mechanical engineering, such as3D/Eye (www.eye.com) with TriSpectives and SolidWorks (www.solidworks.com) withSolidWorks 95, are bringing the Windows GUI into CAD, providing a different wayto work with models. This next generation of applications combines CAD withanimation and rendering. Although they may be non-traditional, theseapplications offer advantages such as ease-of-use that old CAD systems don't.

Company Profiles
Most vendors who offer engineering software solutions (Table 1B lists thesevendors) apparently see a future for NT and have ported their products, althoughthe market is significantly Intel-centric. Others are wary and are waiting tosee what the market does before they move to NT. The latter are in the minority,and even they are not completely ignoring the NT opportunity--they have plans.Note, though, that most vendors who offer NT-native products have not portedall their titles yet: Some of their NT products are just portions ofproduct suites, some are full products but without all the supporting modules,and some are the complete suites.

Mentioning several of these companies specifically is worthwhile. Some have"bet the business" on NT, some have been stable for many years and arenow looking for new markets, and some are playing wait and see before portingany or all products.

First, consider Catia/CADAM by Dassault Systemes (marketed by IBM in theUS). This product is one of the world's leading CAD/CAM systems. Companies suchas Boeing (which used it to design the 777), Chrysler, Honda, and many othersuse Catia/CADAM as their sole design system. Catia on UNIX offers engineers acomplete and comprehensive environment to design, model, and manufactureanything from a grommet to a jet airliner. The package can automate the wholeprocess. It will recommend a manufacturing path for the greatest efficiency(which components to build first), tell the machines exactly how to work, andconduct the procedures. At the beginning of March, Dassault announced that ithad ported Catia to NT (and Silicon Graphics) with full support.

Intergraph, a longtime NT supporter, is in the category of companiesbetting the business on NT. Since 1992, Intergraph's primary focus has been onNT hardware and software solutions such as the SolidEdge 3D-CAD package and theTDZ-400 OpenGL-accelerated graphics workstation. The company has grown rapidlyin the NT arena and, with more than a 90% share, now leads the market inarchitectural engineering and construction (AEC) software. Intergraph stilloffers UNIX applications, but NT offerings constitute 70% of total revenue. (So,for this particular company, NT is taking a big slice out of the UNIXmarket).

The electronic design market, which totals an estimated $1.5 billion for1995, has several entries, but most of the revenue is spread over only fourcompanies. The leader, Cadence Design Systems, offers a wide range of designtools for anything from PCB layout and optimization to IC design. The company'snew NT-native Allegro package, which includes these features and interfaces withmanufacturing programs, began shipping in January this year. Cadence considersthird-party interoperability important and will port more products as themarket, or users, convey a need.

Synopsys and HP are in the wait-and-see category: They have not ported anyCAD offerings to NT. Although they are considering doing so, they have noconcrete or immediate plans. This hesitance is odd for such major players in theelectronic and mechanical design markets (Synopsys has a license base of 19,000,and HP has 57,000).

Before NT, scientific visualization and automation and control werewell-developed markets in UNIX and DOS. NT offers new power and flexibility thatthese vendors are bringing to the market. (Table 2 lists these vendors.)Although companies in this area are generally small and privately held,developers such as Visual Numerics (PV-Wave) and Wolfram Research (Mathematica)have ported their products to NT. InTouch and GE Fanuc have followed suit in theautomation market.

This information makes the trend clear. Engineering-related applicationsare moving toward NT, as are support packages such as integration tools (UNIX toPC: Project Boss from CatNet, which lets you integrate Catia information betweenthe platforms).

The Bottom Line
The worldwide software market is, has been, and will probably always be,extremely volatile, but trends are usually solid (for a time, anyway). NT is aforce to reckon with in the engineering marketplace. NT will not outrightreplace UNIX. (DOS is another story, though. Because 16-bit development is allbut dead now, vendors that have Windows 3.X or DOS applications will be forcedinto 32-bit development.) However, NT's scaleability, flexibility, and powerwill continue to attract users and vendors, providing low-cost andhigh-performance engineering solutions.

And, these NT solutions won't be stripped-down versions of the UNIX titles,as has been a problem with ports to other OSs. NT ports will be the fullyfunctional, full-featured products you are used to on UNIX platforms, only NTsolutions will cost less and run on faster hardware.

Please see Table 1A: Engineering Companies by Total Revenue

See also "Engineering Tools in the NT Environment"