Now here's some good news!
MSC has had a hard last few years. First, it branched out, getting into the CAD/PLM reseller business, then the Linux cluster business, then it got seriously nailed by the FTC for a couple of acquisitions that gave it too many of the cards in the advanced Nastran game. And to top it off, it had some accounting problems that got it delisted on NASDAQ. (I could have the order of all this stuff mixed up, but you get the idea.)
MSC just announced that it is filing its overdue 10K from a year ago, and has entered into an agreement to divest its CAD/PLM reseller business.
This sounds like good news, on all fronts. Last July, Daratech reported that MSC was doing surprisingly well [http://www.mscsoftware.com/press/daratech.cfm] , and based on these announcements, and MSC's stock growth in the last year, it appears that Bill Weyand, chairman and CEO, has got the company focused back on the thing it does the best: simulation.
Still, I'm thinking back to a comment I made back in February, on my blog [http://www.evanyares.com] , related to potential acquision targets for Autodesk:
"Now, if I'd like to take a complete flyer, and wildly speculate as to which company Autodesk might acquire to move further into the high-end of the CAD (PLM?) market, it would be MSC Software - though their business partnership relationship with IBM/Dassault would make it rather interesting."
Now that MSC is divesting the part of the business that sells Dassault products, that off-hand remark doesn't seem so wildly speculative any more.
It would probably be a good acquisition for Autodesk - but MSC's market cap (currently over $600 million) is bigger than Autodesk's typical acquisitions. Though Autodesk could afford it, the most recent comments from Carl Bass (incoming CEO) indicated that he's only looking at small acquisitions, and targets of opportunity. (I may be misquoting a bit, but that's the sense I got.) MSC would be a major acquisition - one that would bring a fundamentally different enterprise sensibility to Autodesk, and would thus be a lot more difficult to integrate.
Besides, I suspect that Weyand would like to spend some time growing the company, rather than repairing it.
