Editorial

Cadence and John Cooley: Another View of "the Spaghetti Western" Jonah compares John Cooley's informal review with Cadence's formal customer-satisfaction survey. by Jonah McLeod

As you probably read in the July issue of Integrated System Design , John Cooley wrote a customer-response review of the last Cadence International User's Group meeting. As you might imagine, Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, CA) took issue with some of Cooley's findings, stating that the company's own recent customer satisfaction survey paints a different picture. I thought in fairness I would read and comment on the results.

Cooley's piece concluded that 15 percent of customers rated Cadence customer satisfaction above average, while 55 percent rated the company average, and another 30 percent came in below average. Cooley says the company got "major Brownie points for Verilog's incredible robustness, SourceLink on the Web, SKILL, their user-driven user group, installs, and documentation."

Cadence's survey showed an overall increase in customer satisfaction from 1994 to 1995. Satisfaction with sales representatives and field engineers rose from 4.05 to 4.14, on a scale of 1 to 6. Satisfaction with order delivery increased from 3.51 to 3.9, while installation rose from 3.45 to 3.74.

Similar increases were achieved for licensing, software solutions, documentation, and problem resolution. Training and SourceLink were added to the survey in 1995 and scored 3.86 and 3.83, respectively. The one area where customer satisfaction fell was support personnel, from 4.38 in 1994, to 4.26 in 1995.

The company placed stock in the secured customer index, which combined four variables: likelihood to recommend Cadence, likelihood to repurchase, support satisfaction, and product satisfaction. In 1994, 12 percent of respondents were secured, 78 percent showed some risk of leaving Cadence, and 10 percent were at high risk to abandon the company. In 1995, the respondents in the secured camp rose to 15 percent, the group with some risk of defecting rose to 80 percent, while the high risk group was cut in half.

Cadence's appraisal of the 1995 results, showed customers still citing product quality as the foremost issue. "Product quality was referred to in many ways, but the most common quotes were 'reduce the number of bugs'; '[make] QA tools better'; and 'improve stability of releases--we're sick of needing hot fixes.'"

Support quality was the second highest customer concern. "Support quality was also referred to in many ways, but the most common quotes were 'fix bugs quickly'; 'don't say it will be fixed in the next release'; and 'improve the technical skills/knowledge of AEs.'"

Cadence products showing the highest customer satisfaction, in order of preference, were Verilog, Concept, Virtuoso, Spectre, and Allegro. Those with the lowest rating, in order of least worst to worst, were Cell Ensemble, Veritime, Block Ensemble, and Preview.

In general, engineering managers (11 percent of respondents) were least satisfied with the company, while designers (31 percent of respondents) were most satisfied. Surprisingly, small design groups were more satisfied than large groups; first-tier customers were less satisfied than second-tier customers; and respondents from IC companies were less satisfied than those from systems companies.

On the whole, both the Cadence formal study and Cooley's informal one reached much the same conclusion, though arguably the former did so with much less fervor. Let me know what you think of the two surveys. My e-mail address is jonah@asic.com.

Jonah McLeod is editor-in-chief of Integrated System Design.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please e-mail your message to michael@asic.com.

integrated system design  August 1996