Now here is my take on the winners and losers in this event. Whether these acquisitions make sense or not might not be the right question to ask.

Corporate speak for “let us throw some darts on the wall and see what sticks.” Watch for more such acquisitions in the near future. With so much money not earning much in terms of interest the executives at Autodesk must be itching to pull the trigger on “strategic acquisitions”.

Autodesk has $2.5 billion in the bank.

Now with the acquisition of a CAM company, they are trying to walk up the value chain and be considered as one of the big boys. Autodesk recently announced a PLM product after arguing for a long time that PLM was not necessary for their customers. Both of these companies also have full blown PLM offerings as well. In the case of Dassault Systems, it is Catia & SolidWorks while in the case of Siemens it is the NX & SolidEdge.

Both Dassault Systems and Siemens have enterprise level product offerings as well as a mid-range product offerings in the MCAD space.

Now why is Autodesk buying a company that makes a fully integrated plug-in for a competitor’s product? My thoughts on this are as follows: The parallels here are way too many to not draw the same conclusions. After announcing a $99 price for their Alibre Design product in 2010, they ended up selling out to 3D Systems in 2011. I cannot but compare this with what happened with Alibre Inc. In my opinion, HSMWorks initiated this acquisition conversation because they were in financial trouble or the founders were just tired of not gaining any traction in the marketplace. Connect the dots and I am almost certain that this was a fire sale. It is a small company trying to keep the lights on. They gave away a whopping 1/3 of their entire portfolio. CAM industry insiders will remember the HSMWorks a year ago in SolidWorks world 2011, made a big splash and offered a free 2-1/2 axis program. But I would beg to differ on this opinion. First question that comes to my mind is why in the world are the HSMWorks founders selling out? The conventional wisdom seems to be that the founders of HSMWorks are cashing out after Autodesk came in with an offer they could not refuse.

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