United Kingdom–based Cambashi is a consulting firm that performs market research that analyzes how business issues in industries like energy, utilities, construction and manufacturing are impacted by novel use of information technologies. They have a Web-based industry curriculum and recently delivered an excellent webinar that focused on clarifying and assessing the differences in merger and acquisition behavior of major engineering software companies. By breaking down data from their Cambashi for Research Product Observatory, the webinar broke down the merger and acquisition differences between Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, Ansys, Nemetschek and Trimble.
With a total deal value of over $8 billion, the chart and webinar underscore some pretty interesting differences between the six featured companies.
What Are the Differences?
Let’s take a look at the five most active companies from the acquisition timeline above:
1.) Autodesk – Since they are undergoing the seismic shift to cloud-based subscription models, Autodesk is intriguing to watch because they are betting the farm on their version of the Adobe-like move to the cloud. Cambashi’s research and analysis shows that for the last six years, Autodesk has focused on making smaller acquisitions to integrate interesting technology and knowledge assets into their fold. They acquired Datastay, which turned into PLM 360, GRAITEC’s Advance Steel and Advance Concrete product lines and the Lagoa cloud visualization platform and turned Bitsquid into Stingray, which helped them fortify their status in the games industry. They’ve also been incredibly focused on expanding their reach into manufacturing with some large acquisitions. Their acquisition of Delcam, a supplier of advanced CAM software, is one example of this behavior.
2.) Dassault Systèmes – The data from Cambashi shows that Dassault Systèmes basically employs the opposite strategy of Autodesk, with the data showing that they made fewer but larger deals. They made the largest average deal out of all six companies addressed in the data. Their current strategy is to increase their market size twofold by exploring new markets to exist in. For example, they acquired Gemcom and turned it into GEOVIA, a suite of software for the mining industry, as well as Accelrys, which morphed into BIOVIA for the biological and chemical industry. This reflects a company ethos that relies strongly on its ability to develop key technologies internally, rather than deal with the acquisition of many small companies, like Autodesk does.
3.) Nemetschek – With their strategy solidly based on creating more building information modeling products and services, their acquisitions of Graphisoft, MAXON, Vectorworks and SCIA line up well with this ideology. They show no signs of changing course with the recent acquisitions of Solibri and Bluebeam. This is not a grab-all strategy—these acquisitions are focused and prove worthwhile. Bluebeam in particular helped increase the group’s revenues in the United States, which shows that they are willing to expand beyond their reach in Europe (especially Germany), the Middle East and Africa.
4.) Trimble - The Trimble data should be taken with a large grain of salt in this comparison, as this data shows all of the acquisition behavior, which is not just software companies, unlike the others. They’ve acquired some very significant companies at varying average deal prices from year to year. These include StruCad, SketchUp, Gehry Technologies, Vico Software and CSC, to name a few. These acquisitions have helped them boost business in engineering and construction sectors and advance their design-build-operate platform.
5.) PTC – Coming in second to Dassault Systèmes for largest average deal size, their strategy focuses on acquiring companies that will help them further enter and gain market share of the growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. But this reflects a broader recognition of the possibilities for product lifecycle management providers as they converge directly into the IoT upswell. PTC, for example, acquired Axeda, ThingWorx and Atego; Autodesk acquired SeeControl in 2015; and Dassault Systèmes acquired Geensoft in 2010. Even ANSYS, the least active in acquisitions over this time period, acquired Esterel Technologies in 2012.
Though Siemens PLM was left off the timeline, Cambashi made a point to note the company’s significant acquisitions in both large and small deals, which included Vistagy, Camstar, Polarion Software and, most recently, the U.S.-based simulation software provider CD-adapco for nearly a billion dollars.