Intergraph Corp has sold off one more piece of its business, as it attempts to reposition itself as a software and services company aiming at vertical markets. Mentor Graphics Corp stepped forward yesterday as the buyer for Intergraph’s VeriBest electronic design automation company, on undisclosed terms. At the end of last month, Intergraph reported third-quarter revenue down 9.9% to $228.5m and a net loss of $45.5m.
VeriBest was the name given to what was originally known as Intergraph Electronics before it was spun-off as a separate company back in 1996 (CI No 2,830). The unit actually dates back to Intergraph’s acquisition of the merged Daisy Systems Inc/Cadnetix company back at the start of the decade. Its headquarters are in Boulder, Colorado, with development offices in Huntsville and Mountain View, California. At the spin-off in 1996, annual revenue was $34m and there were 350 employees, but that number has since fallen to about 200. VeriBest tools include design capture, simulation, synthesis, layout, verification and analysis tools for Microsoft and Unix-based systems.
Mentor was a fierce rival to VeriBest in the printed circuit board layout market. Mentor now claims the VeriBest’s Expedition PCB and its own Board Station products are complementary. It says it will offer and support both sets of products. What Mentor does gain is access to VeriBest’s Destination autorouter technology, an acknowledged gap in its own current product line.
Hit by a high-profile legal battle with Intel Corp and falling sales of its Intel-based graphics workstation line, Intergraph announced its intentions to sell off VeriBest, along with its ViZual Computing workstation and Intense3D graphics chip businesses, in September (CI No 3,739). It is also exiting the generic PC and server businesses, and has sold off the ANAtech scanner unit to Colortrac Inc (CI No 3,749). The company is currently in the process of cutting 400 jobs from its payroll and consolidating offices worldwide.
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