Sun Microsystems, Lucent, Synopsys, and Avnet Team with Internet Startup, Toolwire, To Deliver New Approach for B2B Engineering Collaboration - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Dec 13, 1999

Toolwire Tuesday announced that it has teamed with Sun Microsystems, Lucent, Synopsys and Avnet to deliver powerful software design tools, top-of-the-line hardware servers, and virtually unlimited access to high-performance computing resources to engineers, from anywhere, anytime and on demand. For the first time, engineers and businesses can "pay-per-use" to leverage a premiere suite of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and productivity services through a web-based application service provider (ASP) workbench at www.toolwire.com.

Toolwire, along with its partners, redefines the current computing paradigm by making state-of-the-art engineering technology and related engineering services accessible via the desktop browser, without the up-front multi-million dollar hardware and software investments currently required. This alliance with Toolwire also represents a very aggressive B2B strategy by technology leaders -- Sun, Lucent, Synopsys and Avnet -- to enable distributed engineering teams and partnering companies to collaborate on the next generation of electronic products destined for the home, the business and powering the Internet itself.

"Toolwire has the future of computing services well defined," said Sun Microsystems' Fred James, EDA Relations Manager. "Their web-based ASP approach is where we see the future of not only EDA tools but many strategic software packages in general." As a member of Sun's Incubator Program, Toolwire will leverage industrial-strength Sun hardware and software technologies to scale to any engineer or engineering team's computing requirements. Sun is also helping Toolwire to ensure instant 24x7 access at a security level that matches or exceeds that available on in-house networks.

"Previously, companies would have to spend millions of dollars and months of time and effort setting up and maintaining these design software tools and other computing resources that Toolwire has made available on-demand," said Dan Hodges, CEO and founder of Toolwire. "No other vendor has attempted to make such sophisticated, heavy-duty and powerful design software available through an ASP format like Toolwire has done together with its partners. Toolwire essentially levels the playing field for companies designing next generation technology or consumer products, bringing corporations to new levels of cost efficiency and effectiveness."

A New Design Environment that Will Significantly Impact the Industry Two strong forces are everyday realities of today's electronics industry -- next generation consumer and business products are requiring more complex technology, and increased market competition is challenging electronics manufacturers to race their products to market faster than ever before. Time-to-market execution is a business imperative for all companies wishing to succeed in the new millennium. Electronic design is one of the most important, yet time-consuming, stages of product development for popular consumer items like the Palm Pilot, every day appliances like the PC, and the hardware fabric of the Internet itself that allows us to buy groceries online.

The software and hardware required to run the in-house electronic design operations for products like these come at a great price -- the EDA industry exceeds $3 billion annually and the associated infrastructure costs are greater than $8 billion. Productivity enhancing advances in this industry enable companies to conceive, design and launch new products faster, to better compete for a larger portion of the overall multi-trillion dollar electronics product market.

Toolwire, with its partners, dramatically simplifies the product development process by aggregating familiar tools and services onto a web-accessed workbench. Toolwire allows the design infrastructure to be fully outsourced while providing much greater utility and flexibility. Toolwire gives vendors, like Sun, Lucent, Synopsys and Avnet, an excellent platform on which to deliver their tools and provides designers with broad access to the widest possible range of resources. It also gives partnering businesses an easy way to collaborate on joint product designs in a B2B capacity.

Industry Leaders Align with Toolwire

Lucent's programmable logic customers are being directed to Toolwire for instant, online access to the ORCA Foundry design tool. "Toolwire not only gives our potential customers the ability to try our tools and devices using nothing more complicated than a web browser, but it also enables our customers to start designing silicon products now," said Fred Koons, FPGA software product planning manager at Lucent's Microelectronics Group.

Synopsys is working with Toolwire to provide access to FPGA Express, its widely used synthesis tool. "Toolwire services are standards-based, familiar, and available to anyone with Internet access," said Jay Michlin, vice president and general manager of FPGA products at Synopsys. "Ultimately, Toolwire seeks to bring to Synopsys the advantages that make the Internet so popular in so many other business areas."