Jeff, I appreciate your balanced, dispassionate view. As I have said previously I'm come at this Sigma handicapping exercise as a businessperson, not as a technician. And I agree, from the businessperson's standpoint, that the 3DSim partnership is the most intriguing recent development. I have also had the impression that this may be more meaningful because of Ansys' purchase of 3DSim.
I would add, as far as Ansys is concerned, that in addition to a much larger company selling FLEX, what's notable to me and could reflect some confirmation of value in PrintRite is:
Flex, as 3DSim's new, soon to be released product launch, would seem to be a product that Ansys is excited about -- (otherwise why buy 3DSim? It's not as if they have 20 different software products. Yes they could also be buying some other points of value -- such as impressive engineers and perhaps IP, that aren't necessarily apparent from the outside...but they must believe in FLEX or they wouldn't have been impressed with the team, the technology, etc...and they would not have purchased 3DSim ). And there may be an indirect nod of validation here of PrintRite from Ansys, in addition to a vote of confidence in PrintRite by 3DSim.
Also, relatedly, Ansys' purchase of 3DSim having closed, (closed, as opposed to an announcement of a deal which could have meant that Ansys' due diligence remained incomplete), within a week of the announcement of the PrintRite module inclusion within FLEX - indicates to me that Ansys liked the idea of the PrintRite module -- that their engineers had seen whatever data 3Dsim had on PrintRite working together with FLEX and found that persuasive enough to be fine with 3Dsim advertising the optional connection to PrintRite within FLEX, a mere few days prior to the announcement of Ansys' done deal with 3DSim.
Does this mean anything in the absolute? No. But I find it notable and encouraging.
Any add'l thoughts?
