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| UPDATED: 2006-04-07 |
 Autodesk And The Toxik Avenger 
By: David Utter 2006-04-07 The design software company has bet big on Toxik 2007, its collaborative digital compositing software for feature film production. Autodesk (ADSK) added Toxik to its product line last year. Six releases later, Toxik 2007 will hit the streets beginning at the National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow in Las Vegas this month.
The company touted key features like Paint for retouching images and mattes, and 3D Control enhancements to its Reaction 3D compositing tool. The product uses a centralized Oracle (ORCL) database to facilitate collaboration among remote Toxik users. AMD (AMD) support is listed as another feature for Toxik 2007. The product works on both Intel and AMD platforms; AMD could use this feature's multiprocessor support as a selling point with studios and design houses who are considering hardware upgrades. Another point AMD can promote would be Toxik's availability on Red Hat Linux (RHAT), which would offer significant operating system licensing savings for each new workstation running Linux instead of Windows XP and Toxik. In other tech software news, Synplicity, Inc (SYNP) recently decided to move from certain ASIC fields to focus on FPGA and ASIC verification instead. "LSI Logic's recent decision to withdraw their RapidChip platform ASIC product from the market prompted a reassessment of the market opportunity associated with our investments in the ASIC product line," Gary Meyers, Synplicity's CEO and president, said in a statement. "The impact of their withdrawal delays the estimated time at which our ASIC software business could become profitable." The company also disclosed it would layoff about 8 percent of its workforce and incur a charge of around $900,000 related to those layoffs. Synplicity anticipates savings of $4.5 million annually in personnel-related expenses. Enterprise data integration software firm Attunity (ATTU) followed up a late March announcement of support for Microsoft's (MSFT) BizTalk Server 2006 with the disclosure it would expand an existing partnership with Oracle as well. Itamar Ankorion, Attunity's Director of product management, said in a statement the expansion "considerably extends Attunity's market reach through Oracle's various distribution channels and expands its market share in the data integration sector." Manhattan Associates (MANH) saw analyst Brad Whitt of RBC Capital Markets downgrade the stock to "underperform" and chop the target price to $21 from $23, newratings.com reported: In a research note published yesterday, the analyst mentions that the company has reported its F1Q06 EPS short of the estimates and the consensus due to lower-than-expected software revenues. The shortfall in software revenues was due to customer delays, the analyst says. RBC Capital Markets considers Manhattan Associates’ pro forma EPS guidance for FY06 highly aggressive, given the weak 1Q results.
KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Mark Schappel also downgraded the company's shares to "hold" from "buy." Manhattan Associates will announce first-quarter 2006 results on April 25th after markets close. --- Tags: Autodesk, AMD, Synplicity, Attunity, Manhattan Associates Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | PreFound.com Keep up with IFN and bookmark us today - 
View All Articles by David Utter About the Author: David Utter is a staff writer for InternetFinancialNews and WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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