Synopsys, Inc. (SNPS)
NASDAQ: SNPS · Real-Time Price · USD
384.97
+3.80 (1.00%)
At close: Sep 18, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT
387.96
+2.99 (0.78%)
Pre-market: Sep 21, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT
← View all transcripts

Investor Day 2019

Apr 2, 2019

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

Morning, everybody. How are you? Good to see you. I'm Lisa Ewbank, I'm Head of Investor Relations at Synopsys. We're really happy to have you here today. Just a couple quick words before we get started. It's been a few years since we've had our last investor day here in New York, about three and a half or so. We've got some really exciting things to share with you, we think. We're able to bring you, I think, a really solid group of presenters that you'll meet shortly. I wanted to say that we do have a mix of familiarity with the company and with the space. What we've tried to do is provide a little bit of information for all levels of familiarity in the hopes that it will be valuable for you. To that end, this is our agenda for today.

We're going to start off and have Aart de Geus, Chairman and Co-CEO of the company, talk about some dynamic markets that are fueling our growth. He'll hand it over to some of our technology. Andreas Kuehlmann, who is a Co-GM of our Software Security and Quality business, or Software Integrity, will do a little bit of a deep dive on Software Integrity and some of the drivers and some of the numbers. We're also very honored to have with us Graham Holmes from Cisco, who is a longtime partner of the Software Integrity folks, and he'll talk about the Cisco software security posture and our long-term partnership. We're very happy to have him here.

We will then have a short break and hand it over to John Koeter, who'll give us an update on our semiconductor IP space, the markets, the drivers, and some of the numbers there. Sassine Ghazi, who's Co-GM of our design group, will give us a download, if you will, on electronic design automation. Again, there are some people here who are more familiar with the software security side, others who are more familiar with EDA, so we'll provide a rounding out of both of those. Of course, we have Trac Pham, our CFO, who'll give a financial update, and we'll bring everybody up here as a panel, and we'll have a good Q&A session, after which we'll have lunch.

We'll have each of our executives at a different table, so you're welcome to sit with whomever you'd like and grill them to your heart's content. There are bios in your handout. Before we start, I'm obligated to provide a safe harbor statement, of course. We will make forward-looking statements that are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ materially from what we expect. Please take a look at our lists of risks and uncertainties in our SEC filings and also in the back of your handout and in the slides that are posted on our website. We are being webcast, so keep that in mind when you're asking questions. We'll have microphones so that everybody on the webcast can hear you. Finally, we will be referring to non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliations to their most comparable GAAP financial measures are in the back of your handout and also in the slides that are posted on our website. With that, I will hand it over to Aart de Geus.

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Good morning. A real pleasure to see so many of you here. A number of you have followed us for literally a decade. Some of you are new to Synopsys. We'll try to provide a good overview of the company. It's a great time to do that because we are in a situation of an extremely interesting, fast-moving market at a time where Synopsys is fast-moving as well and has a real sense of momentum after a number of years of quite substantial investments in broadening our position in those markets. Today, we'd like to split the presentation of the company really in three themes. One is the overall environment, the landscape, what it feels like, why technologies will drive the future, how we play into that.

I'll do that, and then you have three people that very much can focus on technology as much as you want or can give the perspective from their respective businesses. Last but not least, give a sense of the financials from the perspective of the long term, from the perspective of the themes that you care about, which are growth and profitability, things that we pay a high degree of attention to. What makes the first topic particularly interesting is that, especially if you look at it from the perspective of our existence, which is a bit over 30 years, we've had the privilege to literally participate in immense waves. The first wave you're quite familiar with, the computational wave that then morphed into networking and ultimately became the cloud. The wave that then brought about mobility and communications.

Now we have this wave of cognition, artificial intelligence, which are big words, but they are words that are very profound because they fundamentally change the nature of virtually all the verticals. We are sitting in the midst of that, and a number of years ago, we foresaw that there was this movement that was enabled by hardware, by silicon, that was suddenly going to enable a whole new wave of computation. Problem? Yeah, I can see it. A whole wave of new capabilities and the notion of cognition or AI or machine learning, there are different terms for that, which a mere decade ago felt very far away, suddenly became very practical. When you have a situation like that brings a whole new set of dynamics to the market because profound change bring about other changes that are sometimes predictable and sometimes not predictable at all.

Be it as it may, we started to invest on this intersection between hardware and software, and then even in the software side, because we had discovered that our own customers had more than 50% of their engineers were not hardware engineers, they were software engineers. In other words, the value was delivered through the functionality of the combination of the two. With this whole wave towards essentially making literally everything smart in some form or another, comes also some new challenges, such as making everything secure. These are themes that, for Synopsys, we have invested in, we are moving forward on, and we're seeing great opportunities. When we say everything, it is literally everything.

Meaning from your home, from your car, to agriculture, to health, to financial world, all the way to yesterday on the radio, I heard that a couple of undergrad students had done some project on looking at astronomy data and had found two planets. That's pretty cool if you're an undergrad student and you find two planets. Machine learning just took a lot of data and found some perturbations on it. Not that we're in the astronomy field all that much, but it's just an illustration that everything will be touched in unexpected ways. Before we go there, a quick snapshot of where Synopsys is today. Last year, we passed the $3 billion mark, and that feels so yesterday, of course. The next challenge is the $4 billion mark.

We have somewhere between 13,000 and 14,000 employees, very much distributed in the world and very much high tech employees. We have a very large component of engineers, mostly master level, many PhDs. The investment in high tech and in R&D has been profound since the beginning of the days. We are spread all over the world, both in terms of the R&D centers, but also just as importantly, to be close to the customers. Our business model has been quite successful at not only delivering very consistent growth, but also do it in a fashion that has a fairly high degree of predictability to the business model. This is largely due to something that Synopsys pioneered already around the early 2000s, which is a mostly ratable business model. In other words, we sell the software in roughly three-year increments.

We recognize the revenue ratably over that time. That timeframe gives us a stability of prediction of the numbers that is quite remarkably good, even if some portions of the sales are more year by year. As mentioned, we are extremely international. This is for multiple reasons. The first reason is proximity to the customer. The close link to the customer is actually important in how we deliver the value and how we help customers solve the problems that they encounter invariably by being at the state-of-the-art. By the way, that's not all negative. That's actually very positive because the fact that they count on us is simultaneously our opportunity to learn from them and see the directions that they are taking. The second reason is we distributed our workforce also to take advantage of different compensation scales and cost areas.

We have large contingents in China, India, Armenia, a number of research and development centers in Europe, and of course, in the U.S. If we look at our business, fundamentally, there are three positions that you should consider us about. The first one, which is the one that we started with, is EDA, Electronic Design Automation. Those are all the tools that you use to design chips, we are far and away the number one, and continue to actually press the state-of-the-art quite ferociously. We've always benefited from being at the leading edge, our customers have been able to do unbelievable feats by using our tools. We've also discovered already about 20 years ago that if you could just reuse something instead of designing it's a massive saving. It's very high efficiency.

We have a fabulous catalog of building blocks that go on a chip that essentially are ready to go and done. Actually, John Koeter, a little bit later, will be giving you some insight to that. That business has grown fabulously well also by virtue of becoming more and more complex. With other words, the building blocks have become more sophisticated. Lastly, we entered the field of software integrity. Think of it as looking at software quality and software security five years ago. It's been pretty much exactly five years that we did the first acquisition of a company called Coverity. We made some more acquisitions and have grown that business substantially.

What's most important is that we have, in that time, been able to already build a brand that's recognizable by heads of IT, by CISOs, by people that look at large companies and want to systematically go after eradicating as much as possible issues, or at least diagnosing them when they become diagnosable. If we look at it from the sizes of the business, EDA, as you would expect, is the largest one, roughly speaking, about 65% of the business. Today, we would say it's growing at mid to high single digits growth rate. It's also the most profitable part of Synopsys. It is amended by the IP business that literally sits on top of that, and our tools are very effective at getting good results out of the IP. It's already past the 20% of our business.

15 years into it started very much like a build or buy of small things. Now it is extremely sophisticated building blocks. I always like to use something that all of you know well, which is the USB you have on the back of your computer. The vast majority, 90+%, come from Synopsys, if not more. We do many of these type of interfaces that continually go through a growth in complexity and in speed. Last but certainly not least, the software integrity business. This has been a particularly interesting entry for us because while it sits right on top of what we do today, it's already grown to about 10% of our business. At least it will pass the 10% point this year.

It's an area that is emerging with quite high speed because, as you will see in a minute, a high complexity of circuits and of systems brings about growth of vulnerabilities that needs to be managed. This is all put in the backdrop of a history that some of you are extremely familiar with. What you see here is the semiconductor history in terms of its revenue on a quarter-by-quarter basis, a very rapid initial growth. The 2001 downturn. You see also the 2008, 2009 downturn. By the way, we did not see that much of it as a company, partially because of our reasonable business model. The consolidation, the up and down, and then the preparation for what is now hypothesis, of course, continued growth as AI manifests itself in every product segment.

If you look at it from a major impact wave, clearly computation, where PC was the killer app that then got connected via Internet and then a whole set of technologies essentially amplified that all the way to today, seeing massive growth in both privates and public clouds. This all changed when somebody took the computer and essentially added communication capability to it. Most importantly, from a technical point of view, really focused on low power. Can you make this work on low power? It was interesting talking to one of the CTO of one of the large phone companies in the early 2000s, who looked at the first Apple phone and said, "What is this thing? It's not even a good phone.

Who wants to touch the screen with a finger?" Not realizing that this was a communication machine, and just witness when you were all walking around. While you were getting food, you were checking on updates on life, right? It has completely changed everything because that communication, any place, any time, in a fashion that is sustainable on a battery for at least a day, is quite remarkable. That was the focus on the early 2000s to make that technically possible. If you now add to that the fact that computation and the low power have continued at a very rapid speed, this has now opened up the door to all kinds of things. Yes, initially, IoT was sort of the word, then AI sort of started to come up. Cloud started to aggregate things.

Fundamentally, it is the age of cognition or the age of smart everything that has opened up. It is absolutely the intersection of chip technology, systems technology, and software technology. When you bring all of these things together, it brings me to one of my favorite pictures, because this is sort of how we describe our thinking of what Synopsys should do, is that we're sitting in the midst of two forces. A continuation of silicon technology. Yes, Moore's Law economically has slowed down, technically is still moving very rapidly. The implication of Moore's Law, which is deliver more computation in some form or another via bright engineering, will absolutely continue.

Because of that, you reach these plateaus where things suddenly become possible, the suddenly possible is really the machine learning, the deep learning, the using large amounts of data to do not deductive reasoning, deductive computation, but do pattern matching. You look at the human brain, we are good at both. We can actually prove things. We can do computations, but we can also recognize patterns. Finally, the computer is starting to mimic this from both sides, and we're still far away from what the human brain can do. There's a roadmap, which is, okay, how fast can we get there? I want to emphasize why that roadmap is important, because that roadmap says that everything that sits in the software side and the AI side will say, "Give me more computation. Drive the silicon harder," which is great for the silicon world.

At the same time, every advance on the silicon, on the systems technology side will enable AI faster. That is precisely what happens when you have these growth phases in technology, which is that they nurture themselves with the requirements driving the technology and the technology enabling new requirements. Not surprisingly, around all of this, we have the good fortune to sit in the middle. You will have noticed that we systematically invested up from silicon for the first 20 years. In the last 10 years, we have been looking at how do we get closer to this hardware-software interface. In the last five years, as mentioned, we invested on the software side down under really the label of security and quality. If you look at what is around this, fundamental computation, of course.

IoT has an enormous amount of promise, maybe economically, certainly from the point of view of connecting everything to the real world. Enormous numbers of sensors creating a vast amount of data. This is going to be accelerated by the coming about of 5G, which is the next generation of high bandwidth, low latency computation that many people see as, again, opening a wave of different ways of connecting things going forward. Then on top of that, as mentioned, AI and machine learning. That rapidly already pushing itself in the cloud because AI has, at a minimum, the learning part and the interpretation part. Interpretation tends to be closer to the IoT. The learning is more inside of the cloud.

Last but not least, this challenge of making the systemic sophistication not victim to the fact that it can be touched and maybe intruded on at many different places. To give a sense of that, you have literally these capabilities now touching every business that you can think of, some already highly visible because they're so demonstrative. In a minute we'll talk about automotive, the very fact that a car could be driving on its own, when you think about it, is actually quite close to ultimate science fiction, and yet it's happening in front of us. As you well know, in every domain, including yours, the notion of machine learning on broad sets of data that come from many different sources, which is difficult to do for humans, will have major impact.

That can range from agriculture to robotics to you name it should be on that list. Have a look at one of those that is particularly interesting because it both is a collection of quite remarkable technologies, but it's also an extremely sophisticated existing value chain. If you look at automotive, not that automotive has not used electronics, automotive has had electronics really since the '80s, mostly around electronic controllers for the engine. Now the amount of electronics that is moving into the car is truly astonishing. What is also astonishing is that traditionally, cars used pretty well-established chip types that are not the leading edge. By the time you throw the word AI in it, you want to be at the leading edge because the faster a thing can think, the better it will recognize what's in front of you.

That changes the very behavior of the car industry because the car manufacturers that in the past delegated to the tier 1s, that in turn delegated to the chip manufacturers, are now suddenly very interested in what the chips can actually do and what to expect from that. On top of this has traditionally sat the car, and the car is now rapidly being decomposed in a set of subsystems. Those subsystems themselves talk together through a gateway that in turn has an interconnect set to the outside world, be it through sensors, also through communication, to cloud environments. Each one of those is really in a revolutionary path of change, and you can already sense one of the challenges. Cars have a long life cycle, both in terms of development and utilization. Electronics is changing really, really fast.

One of the questions, how will you keep these things up to date? We actually play a role in that because we will help these manufacturers simulate their car, meaning create a fake program that allows you to try out the software before the hardware is ready with our tools, and Synopsys is actually quite advanced in that. Which brings me to the software. The most advanced cars are about 150 million lines of code, and as we all know, there must be zero bugs in this, and I'm sure they do. That code will continue to grow massively. With it's not only that there's more to be done, but also every few years there will be updates and replacements. Each one of those need to be verified for security and safety before they actually arrive at the car, a nontrivial task.

That brings us now to what that code does. Well, there are different layers, of course, all the things that control the car and assess the situation, and then the layers above that that actually provide the reasoning. On top of that, the reasoning towards objective to actually drive and make decisions on where the car can go. Last but not least, there's a whole top layer on top of that, which is, if you can do that, the whole notion of ownership and infrastructure will substantially change. If you threw into this picture one more change, which is the electrification of the car, you can see that the intersection between automotive and infrastructure is actually going to be a substantial change vector in the years to come.

It's one thing to say we're going to have a lot of electric cars, another thing to say, where are you going to plug them in? How do you get energy there? How can you make sure it's clean energy, et cetera? There's one thing on top of this picture that you should realize is this is an enormously sophisticated, large supply chain that has been orchestrated literally for 100 years. Inside of this supply chain are non-traditional vendors that suddenly provide the biggest rate of change. We are going to see quite a renewal of how this operates, and this is where we are very fortunate because literally we touch people at every one of these layers. In the first 25 plus years of Synopsys, I may have had three visits to car manufacturers.

We talk to them multiple times per quarter. That is a very radical change, the car manufacturer sits in the middle of this and delegates to tier 1s, delegates to chip companies, delegates to software providers, delegates to works with apps providers. It is becoming a hub and a model of a sophisticated value chain. The one challenge that sits on top of that is security, of course, because when you have very high systemically complex issues, that means you have many different touchpoints. We've really grown up with scale complexity. More transistors, more transistors, more transistors, and that was enormously sophisticated from a technical point of view. Systemic complexity multiplies this. With other words, it adds multiple dimensions to the problems, multiple fields that intersect. For us, this is a great opportunity to broaden our business.

It was one of the reasons to go more towards the software. At the same time, it does bring challenges for the world and for most industries. Security is one of them, and this is one of the reasons we have invested substantially there. Which brings me to a little bit of the strategy of Synopsys. We've always viewed things as there's a technology aspect to our business and a business aspect. I always like to call this tech-onomics. It's not used much in Wall Street, but it's meaningful to us because as much as you think that we are driven by technology, all technology is completely subject to the economic impact, the ROI, in the context of its utilization. Making the right choices is not so difficult. Making the right choices at the right time is where most of the strategy decision-making sits.

Innovation comes about when the economics actually look promising. Suddenly the race is on, the minute somebody's successful, you find many other people that chase this. It takes both the innovation capability and the ability to financially stay initially above water at a small company and then gradually keep doing well and have essentially a funding machine that can invest in itself for the long term and can be amended by acquisitions, mergers, et cetera. Leadership and vision are important in this, they have to be very much complemented by having the market be ready at the right time, most importantly, working closely with the customers that matter. Since the early days, we put a high emphasis on our customer relationships.

We are privileged to be on the inside of all the large companies, every single one of them, at the closest places to where the most advanced chips are done in the world. That learning machine is essential to the health of Synopsys. At the same time, from an economic point of view, at the end of the day, it's all about execution and growth. Growth, of course, has the potential to bring profitability and margin. As you know, we have put a strong emphasis right now on a balance of growth and margin, and Trac will be talking more to you about that. Last but not least, it does take some courage because the courage is to make some bets that are further out in the future. I would say that the going into the software integrity business was one of those decisions.

We looked at many adjacencies that could be powerful to us. That's the one that we decided on. I'm very happy to do that because it augmented our TAM substantially with many customers we'd never touched before. By the way, those are exactly the customers that now are becoming systemically more complex down because they need the advanced technologies to change their outlook. If we look at the construction of Synopsys, let me just give you the rationale for the five business units that we have. We started in design, meaning start with a high-level description of what a chip should do and then build what it takes to actually go down to manufacture. The L shape mirrors a little bit the silicon. You'll see the rest in just a second.

At the same time, when you design things, yes, if these possible mistakes would happen, not necessarily by our tools, but it can be mistakes in the description of what one tries to do, in how one applied things, and so on. In other words, we added a verification business, and the verification business looks upward. Which is it asks the question, "Is the thing that you designed doing what it was supposed to do?" It looks from the functionality point of view, whereas the design looks down to the physics point of view of implementation. The hole in the middle is actually not a hole. This is where we put our IP business because IP is pre-designed things, pre-designed and, by the way, massively pre-verified so that the customer can trust what they're getting.

Since then, we have one deeply specialized business that looks at the actual manufacturing because the physics there have become substantially more complex. On top of that, the software integrity business that I mentioned before. If we briefly look at some of the highlights that the different speakers will bring about, in the software area, we have now grown sufficiently to have multiple products that are being assembled in a coherent platform so that we can not only sell to the individual software developer that uses these tools while developing to minimize the number of potential issues, but also can be used top-down by the people that look at whole companies, that look at vulnerabilities in aggregate, and that need to have a sense if there's a danger to the company.

On the verification, the main push in the last two years has really been at this intersection of hardware, software. If you can run the software before you have the chips, that is great because that means you can find issues earlier in the process, and that is precisely what we're doing. The example of automotive is particularly interesting because automotive is doing that in aggregate for the building of a car. Can you have an electronic model that they can run the software on already before the car is ready? The IP sophistication of the building blocks has really been our growth path, and in some way, it's happening on its own because the blocks themselves are becoming much more demanding, and the silicon technology is more demanding.

Much so that today there are a number of customers that couldn't do the blocks that we do, and they rely on us, and therefore, there's a high-confidence relationship. Design. This has been a very exciting and demanding area. Exciting because in the last five years, we've made a massive investment in our next-generation platform, our fusion platform, and the term fusion in simple terms is bring technologies from multiple areas together and make them work in such a fashion that you get better results and that you can get the better results sooner and potentially even that you can make the chips cheaper. Last but not least, that going down into the silicon has been the journey of learning a lot about deeper and deeper physics.

Literally here we can now do simulation at the atomic level because things are that small. Summarizing all of this, it follows what I think in business school is called the S curve. We started with EDA, so you can see the building blocks, the BUs that are part of EDA. Very rapid growth. Still growing actually quite well, but at some point in time, you say, "Oh, well, you're not sort of an S curve. What's the next one you're going to do?" Well, the next one we did was actually to go into the IP space, and that is now about 15, 20 years ago, and about seven, eight years ago, we started to look again, and we landed on the software space.

I hope that I gave you a little bit of a sense that we are surrounded by opportunities. The biggest challenge for us is really to choose which ones have the highest ROI, invest in them as fast as we possibly can, make sure that we are in a leadership position with the companies that count on us. I would say, so far so good. It feels like we have a lot of momentum right now with the new technologies, and there's certainly plenty of demand for us to fulfill. With that, the next speaker would be Andreas. Here we go.

Andreas Kuehlmann
Co-General Manager, Software Integrity Group, Synopsys

Thank you, Aart. Good morning, everybody. It's an honor to be here and talk about the Software Integrity Group. As Aart just mentioned, actually last week, we had our fifth anniversary. On the 24th of March 2014, we closed the acquisition of Coverity, which was really the beginning of the Software Integrity Group. What we really are all about is we are about helping our customers to build secure, high-quality software faster, if I would have to summarize it in one sentence. We do this with a combination of tools and consulting services, tools that really help development organization to address quality and security issues early on while the code is being developed, and that being complemented with consulting services on various levels, from strategic engagements, program development, to really individual consulting engagements.

Over the last years, we've built our business to $299 million trailing 12 months of revenue. We have about 4,000 customers now acquired, and we are also global, similar to Synopsys. We have our field resources where our customers are in the different regions. Over the last five years, we grew the business from $27 million to $280 million in 2018. What you see in late 2016, we acquired a services business, and the reason for that was very simple. Up to then, we were a pure product company, meaning we had tools that helped our customers to build better software, and we realized that the state of the maturity of our customers is very, very diverse. Some customers are very advanced. They know exactly what to do with tools.

They know exactly how to use the tools, and they're just shopping for the best tool in the market. Other and many other potential customers, they're very early in the maturity cycle. They really start. They may have a mandate from the board. They may have had a security incident, and they really start the journey and ask the question, "What should I actually do?" Far from being ready to actually utilize tools or technologies. They want to start really with a simple assessment. Where am I actually currently, and where do I need to go? That's why the services business for us was a critical element to add to our profile.

Before we go into any detail, I want to step back for a second and quote here Satya Nadella saying, "Every company is a software company." There are many similar quotes out there. You can take Marc Andreessen, who said software is eating the world a few years ago. I think you all are aware of that. Aart was talking about 150 million lines of code in a car, which is a ridiculous amount of code if you think about it. Every company today really has some form of software. This point was driven home to me personally when I visited one of our customer, which is one of the larger container shipping companies, and I had dinner with the head of software. I was talking to him and just asking casually, "Who's your main competitor?" I was very surprised about the answer.

He said Amazon. I was like, "Amazon is really not into container shipping." He said it's all about the logistics today. It's all about the logistics. If you think about Amazon, their business model where you want to have a product or package being shipped from Europe to North America, of course, without any shipping cost. It's all about how do you put all these little boxes together into containers, how do you compose all these containers into that it fits on a ship, and then drive that ship from Europe to North America. He's essentially saying, this logistic, if you don't take control of that, which is really software, you're going to be demoted as a guy who's driving the ship. It's almost like becoming a software API, and the API is saying, "Well, these are all the containers you have over there.

Put them on the ship and take that ship from A to B." For them, it was a very serious threat, and they needed to invest into software in order to stay competitive. If you look at now from a security point of view, if you look historically, computer security was really traditionally network security, endpoint security. Network security in the early days in the '80s and '90s was really about a firewall. When we talk about security, we essentially say we put a firewall around our IT network of a company, and the firewall, what it really does, it hides your servers inside from the outside, meaning nobody can really see the servers. That means any application that you run actually behind the firewall is not visible. The applications don't really have to be secure, so at least we thought.

That really led to software development where, as long as we're behind the firewall, we didn't really care too much about security. The fact is now the days of firewalls are pretty much gone. The applications are moving into the cloud. They become web applications. They become mobile applications in embedded, they move into devices like a car that are connected now today. They don't have the traditional protection of a firewall. The application itself becomes the attack surface. As a result now is that the developers who used to just develop functional code, they become suddenly in the center. They turn into the center of addressing security in the application. What's really interesting, if you see on that chart, still the most of the investment is still done on the network layer.

You go out to the large trade shows like RSA or Black Hat. The big booths are still really from network security, all the traditional. Application security is really the area that is growing very fast, and this is the area that we are playing on. Besides security, there are other items that are very important, and that is whether it's quality, whether it's cost and time to market. This is today, it's not as sexy as security. Security is really on the forefront, but on the business side is equally important. Some of you probably have seen yesterday there was a major disruption in airline traffic, particularly in Southwest, because there was an application actually not working. That is one of the last application that the pilot is using that is checking on the weight of the plane.

Massive disruption because a computer network was actually down. Quality, also, if you look at automotive, for example, compliance in the software, am I actually have the right to use this software in terms of open source? It's equally important as security, even as I said, it's not necessarily on the forefront of the newspapers that we're reading today. This was the why. It's really an important space. Let's talk for a moment about the how, and I have to give you a little bit of background. Probably many of you have seen the term DevOps, and the background of that the software development itself is actually going through a major retooling phase.

I compare that to when the automotive manufacturing really went from assembling one car at a time to line production of a car, where what you actually did is you split the individual steps into very small steps, and you iterated over these steps very fast, and you automated that. It's similar happening in software, where instead of what used to be called a waterfall process, which may take half a year or a year to develop a piece of code, where you start with the requirement, you do the design, you do the implementation, you do the testing. It's now replaced by a much more agile process. They iterate very fast about features. In fact, as some of the web application development, you may release a new feature many times a day.

This entire process from a developer sitting at his or her desk, developing a new feature, testing that feature, automatically testing that, automatically putting the build together, automatically delivering it to the web, automatically essentially putting it production, is now all automated in what's called DevOps. Think about DevOps as fast iterating and automating the entire process, and that has a whole number of advantages. I think the biggest one is continuous feedback. You can essentially keep the customer in the loop. You can try a little thing, and you can do on a web application A/B testing, meaning a small subset you tested out versus a larger subset. You can ask the customers. You can, for example, do updates in a car today very fast, and Tesla has shown this multiple times when you need to react to some incident.

It reduces the friction, it gets higher speed, notably in the software development itself, and overall, it lowers the cost. What's now interesting that what is called DevOps has really over the last years, moved into what's called DevSecOps. That is where the security teams, which used to be more an afterthought. Security was done in a separate team from the development. You had the development team responsible for the features, responsible for delivering the code. The security team thinking afterwards, how do we make this secure? That's naturally actually conflict of interest. We have seen that quite often, that sometimes there's an organizational conflict.

The security really realized that if we move our approach right in the middle of the development process, right in the middle of the automation of DevOps, now called DevSecOps, it really becomes an integral part of the development process itself, and we call this security built in. Meaning, actually, every time you ship a feature, you test for all the security. You test and make sure that it actually complies with what you need. You see a Gartner quote here. That is really something we see very rapidly evolving, and this is something where we actually help development organizations or the security organizations to develop the corresponding processes. If you look at the market that we are currently addressing, the serviceable market that we play in right now, we estimate between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in the different areas that I'm going to show you in a second. Believe the actual TAM is much larger. It's actually at least twice to three times as large. That is really driven by multiple things. Number 1 is really the omnipresence of software. I just mentioned that there's more and more software developed. The software is now connected, whether it's your web application in the cloud, whether it's your mobile application or what we mentioned earlier, all the embedded devices are now connected.

Your refrigerator is connected to the internet, whether it's a good idea or not. As a result, security becomes a primary business issue, meaning if you don't address security, you really have a risk that a breach can actually harm you. Development teams are getting larger and larger. It's amazing. Some of our customers have development teams that are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of developers. The need for these developers to have actually the right tools, the right processes, the right workflows is critical to actually scale the development up. Our segment, we have a growth of about 20%. This is combined of the market growth, which is in the mid-teens, and then a bit of growing our market share.

If you look at now at the market landscape, one thing you will realize if you look at security and quality, it's a highly fractured market. There are many players in that domain. Some are larger, some are smaller. Most of them have one product or two products, or have one service or a suite of services. The different areas, we separate that between static testing, dynamic testing, open source, interactive testing, and then managed services and professional services. What you see over the last years, we have actually built a portfolio out of these different technologies and services that are really critical, we feel, to serve our customers in a way that they can address security and quality while they develop the code.

If you look at the portfolio that we built together, I mentioned this earlier, that in 2016, we came to the realization, just tools is not good enough. Just tools are good enough for the most advanced development shops, that's not good enough for prospects that we have that are much earlier in the journey. We built a portfolio of tools and services together that really helps our customers from a strategy point of view, assessing where am I actually in terms of my journey to security? Where am I in terms of the quality journey? A roadmap then, which can be a year, which can be multiple years, how can I improve? How can I get to a posture that ensures I can actually build security into my development or into my product as well as quality?

That is complemented with a broad suite of professional services. Think about anything of an architecture risk analysis. Think about us building a software security initiative. Think about us helping customers to train the development shop. Think about us helping customers to build a DevOps operation. Think about us also doing very simple things like what's called penetration testing. Penetration testing is the customers asking us, "Can you hack us and show us how you hacked us so that we can fix the problem?" Really broad suite of professional services. I would also like to mention that the professional services piece really helps us to stay sharp because we learn through the professional services engagement, always the latest what customer problems are. That helps us to understand where the market is going.

That helps us to understand what other technology we need to build for the future when other customers need that. That is complemented with a set of managed services. Managed services means we do actually the testing for the customers. That is often for customers that either don't have the resources or they don't have the expertise, or they want to ramp up security testing very fast. We do this remotely. That is delivered through a web portal, and it's also integrated actually in a DevOps workflow for customers. It's just essentially a different mode of delivering the technology that we have. Last but not least, and this is really the core of our business, is the tools that we have. We have Coverity for static code analysis, Black Duck for open source analysis, and Seeker and Defensics for dynamic analysis.

Now I want to give one example, and that's what we call BSIMM. This is really, if you think about the stack that I just showed, it's really often in the beginning of the journey of a customer. BSIMM stands for Building Security In Maturity Model. This is when a customer comes to us and says, "Mr. Synopsys, we don't really know where we are in our journey. We don't really know how we stack up to our peers. Can you help us assessing that?" Think about it, a very early assessment where we, through multiple interviews of all the different stakeholders, we do an assessment of more than 100 metrics and compile this into a report where we compare the maturity of these different activities to the peers in the industry.

That comes with a community, the BSIMM community, where there are two conferences a year. In fact, as today is the conference in Europe is starting. The conference is a community where the security leaders come together and just talk to each other about best practice. Tremendously valuable and tremendously helpful for customers to really start their journey. It's very often complemented by what we call a maturity action plan. That is really a roadmap where we draw for the customer, you are here right now in your maturity. In two, three, or four years, we're going to help you driving your maturity to a higher state. That can involve services, that can involve our technology and our tools, that can involve technology of open source or technology from other providers. I would like to talk a little bit about the Polaris Software Integrity Platform. Aart mentioned that earlier.

This really came from our customers. Our customers were asking over the last few years, "You acquired and you built all these different technologies and services. When am I seeing the benefit that actually you integrate them all into one offering?" The way we see this really from the different personas that a customer has in their shop, the developers want to really see one user interface. They want to see one workflow. They want to see one way of dealing with issues, whether it's in security, whether it's in quality, whether it's compliance. They don't want to play with various different tools that have a different look and feel and a different workflow.

From an executive point of view, whether it's a CISO, whether it's a VP of engineering, or whether it's the head of security, they would like to see one way of reporting the different results. They would like to see one way of having dashboards where they can essentially now take actions and allocate different resources. Then last but not least, from the DevOps engineer and the term is CI/CD, that's related to that, stands for continuous integration, continuous deployment. The person who actually has to integrate the technology into the workflow, that person really would like to see it in one way of doing that. He doesn't want to integrate various tools and different services. It's really a question of efficiency for our customers, but it's equally important for us. It's also a delivery platform.

We see this as a platform where a customer may acquire or may buy Coverity on Polaris, but already it's very easy now, once he's a Coverity user, to try out Black Duck or to try out Seeker or to try out in the future our managed services. It's very easy actually to do upselling and cross-selling as we build this platform out. We had our first launch of the product of the platform just a few weeks ago in March, and we have lots of engagement with customers, lots of interest in that platform. Particularly, it's currently cloud-based, and we are actually very surprised how fast the move is for customers to move their development into the cloud.

If we now look at various examples, I would like to share one example of a customer for the journey that is very typical that we see with customers, and I'm just going to click through this. This is really a large healthcare provider, also has medical devices and pharmaceuticals, and that journey really started in 2016. There was a mandate coming. We have to address software security. A team was formed, and they came to us at the time and said, "Can you do some penetration testing for us?" As I mentioned, penetration testing means can you try to hack us and then essentially show us how you could hack us and we can fix it? Unfortunately, at the time, they had only a budget of $10,000.

We of course, we still engaged, what we really did, we did a training session, how they can do penetration testing themselves. This was really followed a few months later where they said, "Well, we have a little bit more budget, we have some open source tools that are free. Can you help us integrating these open source tools into our development process, and can you customize them for us?" We also introduced BSIMM at the time. We did a BSIMM assessment, which was very interesting for them. They came to the BSIMM conference, learned now from all the peers in the conference what others did, and started really taking security more seriously, meaning allocating more budget. We then, together with them, developed an entire program. That program included a maturity action plan. It included various POCs, proof of concepts for the different tools.

In 2018, we started rolling out that program, that program is still expanding. Just to give you an idea how this follows. In 2016, that was a deal of $10,000. In 2017, we had a deal of $135,000, three years later, in 2018, we had already half a million dollar deal. This is a very typical journey that we see with customers, where we really accompany the customers in their paths to become more mature. All right, if you look at the profile of our customers, we have more than 4,000 customers, as I mentioned, customers are really in all different domains. First of all, a lot of customers that actually share with Synopsys, that are embedded customers very often. We have customers in scientific computing, like NASA is a customer we are very proud of.

The Mars Rover is actually all checked with our technology. We have customers in the gaming industry. We have customers in the financial services industry. We have customers in the medical device industry. Wherever software is being developed, we can help the customers in that domain. One thing that we are particularly proud of, Aart mentioned that earlier, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for application security testing, that's really kind of a fairly high bar to get recognition from the analysts. Literally four years ago, we were nowhere. We moved ourselves now in the Leader Quadrant, in fact, as there is any moment a new version of the Magic Quadrant coming out, we got a little bit of preview, which I cannot share with you, we are super excited about the progress that we are making.

This is something you may want to check out a little bit later. Similarly, the Forrester Wave on static application security testing as well as Forrester Wave on software composition analysis, we worked ourselves fairly quickly up in the Leader part, really attesting to the fact that we built some good technology here. I would like to step back a little bit, and some of you probably were part of the discussion in 2015, when we just launched the Software Integrity Group. At that time, we had about half of our customers were in the traditional Synopsys space, in semi and systems segment, and about half of our customers were outside in the enterprise space, like banks and so on. Over the last years, we have actually grown both segments very well.

On the semi and systems side, we really utilized the collaboration with the EDA and IP sales team. It gives us really access to very trusted relationships in the customers building out these, but then also a really good growth outside of the semi and systems in the enterprise space. As I mentioned, this is banks, this is insurance companies, this is really the container shipping companies, as I mentioned earlier. All right. Similarly, the growth geographically, as I mentioned earlier, we are in all the different regions, and we have really nice growth in all the different regions. The largest fraction is really coming from North America here. This chart is kind of interesting. I would like to share with you. This is really attesting to the fact that our portfolio is start getting stickiness with our customers.

What you see there is how many customer logos actually adopt multiple of our solutions. The solution could be any one of our four products or could be a services engagement. What you see is we have already 23% of the logos use at least two of our solutions. From a revenue perspective, this 23% of logos is actually compounding 65% of our revenue. More interesting is if you just look at this from a service leading perspective, 41% of that revenue is actually coming from engagement that started with a services engagement. This is similar to the journey that I mentioned earlier. The services piece is really very important for us to essentially start an engagement, start the conversation with the customer, and then help them build out an entire program. All right.

I would like to finish the presentation by just talking about our growth strategy is a classical land and expand strategy. Meaning landing with our technology in our core verticals, as well as in new verticals. There are really new verticals that are very interesting. Medical automotive is now a very interesting vertical for us with all the issues that Aart mentioned. Then expand that through additional services, through additional products, and that's something we see really nicely growing. I showed this on the previous chart. For example, Coverity and Black Duck, it's a lot of pull in both directions that we see from customers. Customers just trust us as a brand, not only from what we built over the last five years, but also Synopsys as a known brand in this area.

Then really leveraging our international presence on the backbone of all the offices that we mentioned earlier in Aart's presentation. On the margin side, you saw the reports for Q1. We are prudent in terms of our margins, we are improving our margin over time. But that's of course, always also looking at the growth, taking advantage of the growth. This is something we actively looking at over time. That concludes my presentation. It's now a great pleasure for me to introduce Graham Holmes, who's the Senior Director of Advanced Security Initiatives Group at Cisco. Graham and I are working together for many years, Cisco has been a long-term customer of ours. We have had several battles together, right? It's really great that Graham can share with you here some of his experience. Thank you.

Graham Holmes
Senior Director, Advanced Security Initiatives Group, Cisco

Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Andreas and Aart for having me here to share our journey in security and also the importance and partnership we've played in that role. I've been at Cisco for nearly 21 years, and one of the things I take the most pride in is our vision statement of changing the way we work, live, learn, and play. It's not only a great aspirational goal and provides focus for our innovation, but it's also a good reminder of our responsibility, of the seriousness of what we do and what we need to think about as we develop products that change the way people work, live, learn, and play. It's a call to responsibility and a reminder that trust is important for us to ensure for our customers.

The second most important thing as a security professional at Cisco that I love seeing is Chuck Robbins' statement about the value of security and our brand promise with regard to security. What Chuck is saying, essentially, is that it's not about building security products. It's about ensuring that products are secure. All of our products have security built into them in order to ensure the trust of our customers, ensure that the integrity of what we ship them, what they use, is secure and protected from the threats and the types of concerns that we have in an evolving threat landscape today. Our journey began in security nearly two decades ago, as we thought about the problems of economic attacks against Cisco. The counterfeit capabilities that were showing up.

The issue that counterfeit really raised was, could our customers trust that we were shipping them authentic and reliable, and integrity in our software and in our products? Our initial focus became to ensure that trust was maintained, and we continue to rebuild that trust. We designed our first products initially to counter the counterfeiters and provide trustworthy capabilities in that product, so the customer could be assured that they were receiving an authentic product through authentic channels. That quickly identified that we needed to ensure that basic security requirements were in all of our products. Beginning in 2008, we launched a corporate-wide effort, an initiative that defined what are all the standards and practices that we expect every product, every offer, to have in their product in order to deliver on the promise of building in security into the product.

Our Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle was all about defining that standard for the company. It also went beyond just the development of it, is how do you ensure that the components are authentic from where the sources that you get them, that the operating software that you might OEM or ODM is authentic, that the distribution ensures the integrity of the delivery of that product to our customers as well. Value chain security came hand-in-hand with development security as well. Late 2000s, early 2010, we began to see that trust was becoming an essential critical value to our customers that we had to continuously build and maintain. The news, the issues of breaches that violated customer trust, consumer trust, product trust, were critical issues that every company is seeking to address. I think Cisco had a head start.

We began thinking about this 2002 and earlier, about how do we ensure that trust, the most important thing we do, is done correctly, so that we are providing security and transparency about what we do, so that our customers can understand what we have done and what we are doing to assure the security in their products and the things that we do to change the way people work, live, learn, and play. This is our journey, and it began with understanding how do we build in security. How do we make sure security is not an afterthought, as Andreas talked about later, and bolted on, but security is part of an integral part of the process of which we do work in building our products. Security spans a multitude of things that we must do to deliver on that promise of trust and transparency.

It's about defining standards and securities that you expect every product and every offer to do. It's about ensuring that there are inherent trustworthy technologies, hardware components, software components, that ensure that the outcome is secure as well. Things like trust anchors, secure boot capabilities, hardened crypto. It's also about not only making sure that we meet our rigid internal and rigorous internal standards, but it's also about ensuring that we are meeting the kinds of standards and certifications that our customers expect as well, FIPS compliance, Common Criteria, and other standards that are issued by governments and expected by customers. As I mentioned, it's also about ensuring that you're not just developing securely, you're also acquiring securely.

You're bringing in secure components, that your supply chain, that your distribution chain, that the way you sell, the partners that you work with, are also part of your security offer as well. They have to be just as rigorous in their security standards, and we have to be just as rigorous in our security standards for those components as we do in developing the software itself. Finally, it's also about other things you need to be doing beyond just the things customers expect. It's about privacy by design, and it's about secure partnerships. I really want to talk about how we do this, because the outcome that we're focusing on here is being able to do this at the speed of business to deliver secure solutions. How do you do that? As Andreas mentioned, how do you make sure that we build in security?

How do you make sure that the things that people, the engineers need, are there when they need it, how they need it, and they can have effective security outcomes? What we have done through our partnership and our automation focus over the last few years is really that issue of delivering at the speed, building in security, and we call that digitization. Simplifying things we do, automating it so that it can be done over and over again reliably, and most importantly, integrating that into the workflow so that the engineer has what they need, when they need, and where they need it, so that the outcome is what we expect it to be.

I realize not all of you are secretly coding on Android or iOS, give me half a second to explain a little at a high level, the development process, I can explain, show you also where we integrate best-in-class tools through our partnerships, for example, with Synopsys, with tools that we need to also deliver on these promises of how do we build in security in our process. If you put on your developer hat for a second, the first place you start is design. What is it I want to build? How do I code it? What are the requirements I need to code? How do I then put that all together and integrate it and build it, so I now have a unit that I can test?

I build more components, and I add that into the software package, and that becomes something I integrate. I then want to validate that I did it right. Ideally, I'd like someone to independently audit that and say, "Yeah, you did comply with all the requirements I expect," before we release that software into the wild. Our SDL, our secure development lifecycle, really is that. At the very beginning, providing tools that developers can say, "What's the threats to this product? What are the trust boundaries? How do I protect those trust boundaries? How do I mitigate those?" Next part is, if I'm going to code, what are the security standards I need to have? What are the security specifications I have to meet in order to mitigate the threats that I identified and deliver a secure product? Next is, how do I build that?

When I integrate that into my compiler or whether I'm using a Docker server, a Docker system to be able to integrate my code, I want to make sure that it's secure, that it results in secure outputs, has hardened buffer overflow, memory protections, or uses hardened images that I'll expect to see secure configurations in building them. Finally, I want to integrate that and unit test that, and I want to use static analysis. I want to make sure that the code as designed is actually working the way I expect it to be. It's not only producing quality results, there's no quality defects, but there's also no security defects that I need to address as well. I want to put that all together, test it again as an integrated system, I want to do some other additional hardening checks and validations.

I want to fuzz it. I want to know whether it's going to perform when I give it malicious input or input it doesn't expect, for example. I want to make sure that it's actually running all the code I expect, and that I know all the software that's in there that maybe I built or maybe that I integrated in from an open source or a third party as well. I want to make sure I know what their vulnerabilities are, as well as my own vulnerabilities. Then I want to basically take that and use that capability again to automatically validate every image that I'm going to hand off to a customer or deliver for their use.

That last check should be done independently so that that process says, "Yes, everything that you said you did has been done, the product meets our needs, and we can now release that into the wild." The way we do that, again, is through partnerships. We've leveraged Synopsys over the years to help us with providing the right types of security tools into our system. Through partnerships and professional services, we work with Synopsys to understand what we need to improve upon, where we can use them to help understand the defect density in our software, and tune our static analysis so that we get more productive and less false positives in our results.

Finally, the benchmarking, the BSIMM process that Andreas mentioned a few minutes ago, helps us to understand how are we doing, not only against our customers, but against our competitors and against those people in the industry who are also using our product. We've used them to understand not only where we're going or how we've done, but when we start to project forward what we want to do, whether those plans are going to be effective as well. That together gives you a picture of how you take best-in-class tools and practices, make them available to users, the developers, in a simplified way, automate that into their system, automate it so that it can be integrated into their system, and deliver results at the speed at which they're working today. That has been our story about how we do digitization through our partnership with Synopsys.

Thank you.

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

Thank you, Graham. It's time for a short break. We will start again at 9:55 sharp. Coffee out there. Okay, we'll get started with John Koeter.

John Koeter
VP, IP Group, Synopsys

Hello. Good morning. My name is John Koeter. I'm the Vice President of marketing for Synopsys' Semiconductor IP Group. When Aart was showing you the corporate diagram here earlier, there was a reason why IP is in the middle, because it extends down into the silicon processes and up into the software space. Let me tell you a little bit about, what is semiconductor IP? Semiconductor IP is pre-designed blocks of logic, pre-designed and pre-verified blocks of logics that get integrated into a customer's larger system-on-a-chip, or SoC design. I like to make an analogy of building a house, for example, something I've done three times here in Texas. A little fun fact, every one of those three houses has been hit by lightning here.

As I've gone through that house-building process here, you've had a foundation, you pour the concrete there, you have the two by fours, and you put them together with the nails and stuff. You know what the general contractor has never done? He's never really built an oven. He's never really built a refrigerator. Why? Because there's a lot of great suppliers that can create just exactly what we're looking for. That's really an analogy that I use for the semiconductor IP. It's common functions that go on lots of different chips that our customers can then integrate into their larger SoCs. Let's talk a little bit about it. As Aart mentioned, it's 20% of the overall business, a little bit more, our IP business.

It has been growing very nicely, we expect it to continue to grow very nicely at low double-digit growth rates here. We are the number 2 largest IP provider in the world behind Arm, we're the market leaders in the area of wired interfaces, in the area of embedded memories, in the area of process-specific or foundry-specific IP, which we call physical IP, and in analog IP. We're seeing a lot of opportunities here to continue to grow in IP, I'm going to give you a couple of reasons why that is. One of the reasons is that new market opportunities being driven by some of the trends that Aart highlighted about smart everything, automotive, AI, cloud, and so forth.

Our customers really appreciate the fact that we invest so much in quality that we de-risk creating the IP, because one of the reasons you buy IP is to accelerate your SoC and to de-risk it. The investment in quality and in risk is very important to our customers. Our customers also value having a very broad portfolio of IP to buy from one supplier. So now what I'd like to do is talk a little bit more about the market. According to a market analyst, IPnest, the overall semiconductor IP market is $3.6 billion in size here. Again, the number one player is Arm, and the number one segment in the area of semiconductor IP is in the area of processors and the related functions like DSPs and GPUs.

Within the largest segment there, which is microprocessors, we are the number two vendor behind Arm. In the second-largest segment, which is wired interfaces, wired interfaces are things you use every day, USB, HDMI, Ethernet, so on and so forth, we're the number one provider of IP in that wired interface segment. We're also number one provider in memories, embedded memories. You'll also notice that those blocks are colored green here, because in the industry, those three green blocks are what's known as foundation IP. We have a very, very good position in foundation IP, which is the third largest of the building blocks in semiconductor IP. Then we're also number one in a couple of other areas, analog IP and digital IP. There are a number of things that are driving the semiconductor IP market. I'm going to really focus on three.

One is increasing shift from make to buy, so more outsourcing, as our customers are focused on their core differentiation. There's also the complexity that Aart talked about, the complexity in the standards, the complexity in the chips, and that drives more demand for our IP. Lastly, there's new markets and new market entrants, and that drives demand for our IP. Let's talk first about make versus buy, insourcing versus outsourcing. We have been looking at this data over a very long period of time. This chart happens to come from what we call our global user survey that we do on a yearly basis right here, and it shows the % of IP that is insourced versus outsourced.

You can see in a couple of the common categories, things like verification IP, wired interfaces, memories, the amount that is outsourced to third-party IP providers, like Synopsys, is on a neighborhood of 60%-70%. This % keeps going up by a few % every year as we have done these surveys over a number of years. As I mentioned on the previous slide, the overall size of the IP market according to IPnest is $3.6 billion. If the IP market was 100% fully outsourced, it would be in the neighborhood, I believe, of about $5.5 billion TAM. That SAM, that $3.6 billion SAM, continues to grow as more and more customers choose to buy versus to make. I wanted to talk a little bit about complexity.

Complexity is a great trend for us in IP, because let's just take something as simple that we all know about, USB. USB 2.0, USB 3.0, which is 10 gigabits per second, going up to USB4, which is 40 gigabits per second. In the span of a few years, the USB standard has increased in its complexity from a data rate perspective by a matter of 4X. That comes with a much more complex implementation and with more complex verification. All of that is good for us as an IP provider. Why is it good for us as an IP provider? Well, number one, it's because more and more, it causes customers to ask themselves, "Does this make sense?" More and more, the answer is no. Let's buy it from a trusted IP provider like Synopsys.

Also, as the complexity increases, so does the average selling price of this IP. Another trend that I want to focus on, which is the bottom trend. As Aart was saying earlier, Moore's Law is certainly alive and well, and we're continuing to see very, very strong demand in the most advanced processes, whether it's FinFET processes like 16 and 14, or whether you're talking about advanced 7 nanometer or 5 nanometer FinFET processes, or even the next generation. We're starting to work on some areas there in aspects of our company. I mention this keeping up with Moore's Law for a reason, because as the chips go down Moore's Law, they become more complex, and complexity is good for us. Again, drives higher ASPs from an IP perspective.

The other thing, if you look at from the middle, I mentioned that our customers really value from us getting a broad portfolio of IP. 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, when we started this journey, we started it in interfaces, and we've been continuously expanding our IP portfolio since then into foundation IP, into processors, into security IP, as we provide more and more IP that goes onto an SoC. I next wanted to talk about a market research report from a company called SEMICO, which was done in October of 2018, and you can see we're in the middle here. If you look at 2018 or so, you'll see the number of blocks according to SEMICO, the number of IP blocks on an SoC is 150, heading towards 200 blocks.

Again, this is an area which says with these number of functions, this complexity on a chip, again, our customers are always saying, "Does it make sense to make, or does it make sense to buy?" As they focus their precious engineering resources on their core differentiation, they're saying, "Yes, it makes sense to buy this from a trusted company like Synopsys." The other thing that they're asking us to do is they're asking us to buy not just individual pieces of IP, like in the EDA world, this would be analogous to point tools. They're asking us to put those pieces of IP into a bigger function, which in the industry is called IP subsystems.

This is a trend that's been starting over the last couple of years, and customers are asking us to provide a bigger and deeper solution, which then just increases their trust and collaboration that we have with our customers. I wanted to talk about some of the new markets that are really starting to drive our business and have been for a number of years. The big buzzword, you can't go anywhere without saying Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is, of course, a horizontal technology that's being built into every market segment, but it also is a vertical market segment. When I talk about Artificial Intelligence here, I'm talking about the accelerator chips that go into the data center for things like video transcoding, or maybe it's Artificial Intelligence inferencing or training chips.

Today, according to Intel, I think it's a $2 billion or $3 billion semiconductor TAM that they expect in the next few years to grow by a factor of about $5 billion-$10 billion. There are a lot of new design starts that are coming into the accelerator market. As the data gets more specialized, you need specialized processing units, accelerators are called in the industry, to attack that problem, and you're seeing a lot of customers developing those chips. By the way, many of these customers are brand new. Some of them are coming down from the system level. When you start a brand-new design, what's the first thing you do? You don't have a legacy design group that's been around for 30 years or so. You just say, "Well, it's natural. Of course, I'm going to buy the IP." Right?

I have to get this chip out to market quickly." It's a natural decision in these new green fields to buy IP. Okay, automotive, computer on wheels, some people call it, right? I'll go into it in more slides, but that's also creating a lot of opportunities for us, whether it's in ADAS systems or infotainment or connected cars. There's a lot of innovation going on in this space, creating new opportunities for us and for our IP. In the cloud, everybody's heard of the term hyperscale data centers, more data going through it. Again, that drives more business for us, whether it's in the networking space, the server space, the storage space, and lastly, but certainly not least, in the IoT space as well. Things like smart homes and smart cities are increasing their electronic content and therefore creating opportunities for us.

I just wanted to delve into a couple of those segments in particular. The first is, this is a car here, and as I said, cars are becoming more and more computers on wheels here, whether it's ADAS, Automotive Automated Driver Assistance Systems, or whether it's infotainment, or whether it's what they call V2X, which is in other words, vehicles communicating to each other. If the car in front of you is braking, it tells your car to brake, things like that. That whole thing is called V2X or V to infrastructure. These things are happening in cars right now. Whether it's the gateway, the connectivity, the infotainment, the ADAS systems, the powertrain, whatever, all of that requires a lot of our IP.

I'm not going to highlight all of the IP here that's surrounding the car, but it's a significant opportunity, whether it's things like HDMI or sensor and control interfaces or mobile storage for map updates or different processors for specialized processing in the car. We have a broad portfolio of IP that is certified for use in automotive and certified to automotive standards. Let me talk about some of the new entrants to these fields, which are new greenfield opportunities. This is a startup called Fabu, who is based in Arizona, and they are making ADAS and autonomous driving SoC designs. Again, this is a company that just started. They're starting their first chip. They chose to go with Synopsys IP and a very broad portfolio of Synopsys IP. This is not a isolated story.

Last earnings call, we talked about how we had more than 25 customers in the automotive space here. Again, a lot of opportunity for us in automotive as a company and a lot of opportunities for us in automotive as an IP vendor. I mentioned accelerators going into the data center and how that market was exploding and expected, according to Intel, by growing to 5X. Well, one of the emerging leaders in this space is in a small Israeli company called Habana Labs that we've been working with closely for a number of different years. They just introduced their accelerator chip for AI training and inferencing, and it got great reviews. According to the Linley report, it was 4X faster than other solutions out there in the marketplace. This is just, again, another example of how these type of chips are creating opportunities for us.

Again, this is a startup company, a greenfield opportunity. They didn't think about making their IP. They bought it from the first get-go, and they chose Synopsys because of our broad portfolio, because of our quality, and because of the way that we have collaborated with them to get their chip to market, I should say. Okay, just to wrap up and talk about Synopsys DesignWare IP, just a couple of highlights here. We have a very broad portfolio of IP. We focus on the functions that go on to many, many different type of SoC chips. We are very focused on a lot of the new market segments, as we mentioned here. That's definitely growing the demand in AI and automotive and cloud computing and IoT, all creating great opportunities for us.

Our customers are buying more and more IP from Synopsys, they're also asking us to put together larger functions of IP here into what are called complex, well-integrated subsystems here. As I mentioned several times in this presentation, IP is all about quality and about low risk. We have a reputation for this that's been earned over 15 years. Our customers trust us. We have very deep partnerships with them. We have very deep collaborations with them. We're working with them on the absolute bleeding edge of the technology, the standards, and whatever they need, we're in there as their partner for the long haul to make them successful. With that, I will thank you very much for your time, and I will introduce Sassine Ghazi here.

Sassine Ghazi
SVP and Co-General Manager, Design Group, Synopsys

Thank you, John. Good morning. My name is Sassine Ghazi. Thank you for joining us. I'm the co-GM of our design group. I'll be, in the next 20 minutes or so, walking you through our electronic design automation part of the portfolio. What is EDA for us? Is the combination of silicon, design, and verification product line. That's roughly about 65% of our business. The way I structured the presentation, I'll spend the first section of the presentation talking about the macro-level drivers for EDA. I'll dive very quickly into the innovation we're driving in each segment of the portfolio. What drives EDA? As John mentioned, design complexity. For us, we run towards customers that they are being challenged and designing complex SoCs, complex chips. Think of design complexity and what's driving it along three vectors. There is the advanced processes.

This is what is referred to pushing Moore's Law or the More than Moore as you go from seven nanometer, five nanometer, and beyond. It requires a lot of innovation between process technology and manufacturing, along with design. The second vector is the established nodes. There are still plenty of customers pushing technology on established nodes. I don't want you to assume that if you're a customer on established nodes, your growth or your opportunity to move to the latest technology from Synopsys is less attractive. That's not the case. These are customers that they're making a choice not to move to advanced nodes and optimize their design because of the cost trade-off that they constantly make. The third vector is the massive software content that is becoming integrated as part of the chip design. Let me show you an illustration of that.

If you look at the cost per chip and the ramp-up as you go from 10, seven, and five nanometer is significant. The cost of a five nanometer chip design is about $550 million to develop the chip. The other point I would like to make is look at the software cost as part of the overall cost. It's more than 50% of that $550 million. For us, about seven years ago, we could see the trend as our customers started hiring more and more software engineers to develop their chips. We made significant investment on how do we verify and design hardware and software together, and I'll speak to it during the verification section of the presentation.

As you look at this trend, our customers, when they're making these significant investment, they want to make sure that the tools they're using to design and verify these chips are coming from a supplier that is not only reliable and been around, but can provide technology that is safe to develop these complex chips and not have to respin them. Imagine if you have an error on that chip and you have to redo it once or twice. You go out of business. This slide right here, actually, our customers love to see this slide. This is a data of about 15 years' worth of tracking, and shows the trend between different technology nodes. If you see, the blue colors are a planar transistor or before the FinFET. If you think of Moore's Law, it really went through three transformations.

The planar transistor, which think of it as a horizontal transistor or device, then it moved to FinFET, which is more vertical, and the gate-all-around, which is the latest generation of Moore's Law, is wrapping the fins. Think of it as in a cylinder. The ramp-up of the technology in the planar transistor was fairly consistent. Customers moved from one node to another in a very consistent way. If you look at the green, yellow, and orange, that was the transition to FinFET. It took much longer to transition to the 22 and 20 nanometer. One, it was not a simple decision for customers to make that transition. It was expensive and costly for them. Two, the complexity to design a chip at that node was very difficult. That was a transition that took longer. Don't take me wrong.

Plenty of customers are already on FinFET at this point. You look at that little orange at the bottom of the graph are the five nanometer customers today. The technology innovation that we drive to push Moore's Law and provide solution on the advanced technology applies to established nodes as well. It's not that we need to provide something different for advanced versus established nodes. The same innovation can benefit both customers. We are absolutely the industry favorite at 28 nanometer, and we are driving the FinFET leadership. Actually, we've been very fortunate through our collaboration with customers and the customer who introduced the FinFET. We're very embedded in their design and their environment in order for us to have that head start in that transition. You may ask, how accurate is this data?

When I say Synopsys is used at 99% of the 12 nanometer designs and below, that can be somewhat conservative. We can say we're used everywhere on every chip, on not only advanced node, on any process technology, because we touch a chip in any shape or form, be it at a sign-off level, at the simulation level, et cetera. We have a very strong visibility in terms of what's happening in our customer base and their design environment. With that, talking about technology leadership, let me transition to what you see on the right part of the Which one is on you? The left part of the slide, is the leadership on seven nanometer.

In here, we have number of customers that they came forward and stated the strong value that Synopsys has been able to provide in order for them to deliver their chips on the different market segments they're in. On the right side of the slide, you'll see we had an announcement about a month or so ago, where Samsung introduced the first version of the next device, which is the gate-all-around. Remember the Moore's Law transformation, planar, FinFET, the next one is the gate-all-around. They used our complete solution to develop that test chip. Not a sliver point tools here and there. It was a complete solution from us in order to enable the development of the gate-all-around.

With that, let me transition to our portfolio and how do we work with our customers, to provide the sophistication of technology to enable them. First, let me start with silicon. Our customers here in silicon are the foundries, the manufacturers of the chips, the guys that they actually manufacture and build the chips. With the portfolio in here, I want to point one technology in particular, TCAD. It simulates devices way before anybody else sees them. Meaning way before the customer or anybody in EDA sees the devices. The foundries and the manufacturers are trying to simulate what's possible as they transition to the next technology node. For us, this is a very strong and unique position we're in, because really the bridge between manufacturing and design is so critical as you move to advanced technology, that visibility we get early on is very important.

With TCAD, we have a significant market share, and is being used pretty much with every manufacturer and foundries out there. As we bridge from silicon to design, what is design? Design are the set of tools that our customers use to actually develop the chip. As they start thinking from an architecture point of view, what is it they're trying to build and they want to implement it, they use our product to actually develop the chip. Think of design as has two big elements, digital and analog, in order to develop the SoC. In digital, we are the undisputed number 1 leader in digital. 14 out of the 15 companies or top semiconductor companies use us as the primary partner for digital design. In here, the complexity continues and drives our innovation in a significant way.

There's the analog portion of the design, where we have a portfolio that we took an advantage of the transition from planar to FinFET, and focused primarily on design productivity around analog, and I'll touch on it in few slides. At the highest level, when you think of digital design, it really consists of three pillars. You have synthesis, place and route, and sign-off. These are the three pillars or three design flow practices that our customers go through. They start with synthesis, then they go to place and route, and then they sign off their chip. Synopsys has a number 1 position in each one of these segments. From this position of strength, we thought, what will be the next level of impact that we can provide our customers? With that, we introduced our Fusion Design Platform.

I would like to make a few points here, at a high level to illustrate why this is important. We moved the three pillars, the synthesis, place and route, and sign-off, on the same data model. That's a modern data model that's AI-enabled and is cloud-ready. What does that mean? For us, it's a huge benefit from a productivity point of view. It means our developers are able to share code and share algorithms along these three separate pillars, where historically, they were completely three different steps of the design. Not only it gives us productivity, it provides our customers the best results, the best outcome as they're developing the SoC.

If you talk to any of the semiconductor companies, they're constantly in a race to compete for power, for performance, and for cost. These are really the three measurements that they measure themselves against their competition. That platform will enable them to get there in a much faster time, given we blended the lines between the three pillars. As a result of this investment, which was about actually 5-plus years type of an investment to move this technology on that data model, we introduced a new product, Fusion Compiler, and we introduced this product in November last year, just about five months ago. I cannot say enough about Fusion Compiler, and I'll be overstating it. This is truly something revolutionary in our market. We're changing the way our customers do digital design.

Instead of thinking of this design as three different steps, they can think of it, and we're providing them a product that they can go between the three steps in one product. The feedback from the customer are along two lines. One, it provide them a significant time to market advantage. Two, the benefit for power, performance, and area or cost is significant as a result. Because when you design along three different steps, you lose that benefit because you either overdesign or you have to build margins as you hand off from one step to another. With Fusion Compiler, it's the first and only product today in the market that enables our customers to do design from synthesis to sign-off in a single product.

This is not something that you can anticipate in a quarter or two that somebody else will come up and say, "I have a similar product." The reason it's not possible is, one, or in the time frame that I'm describing is not possible, one, it's the investment that we've made to move the technology, but more importantly, number 2, is the position and the trust that our customers have in our sign-off technology, in our synthesis technology, and in our place and route as the backbone of that product is something that took many decades for us to get to that learning and that innovation and that position. With the introduction of Fusion Compiler, as I mentioned earlier, we introduced it in November. We've had so far 16 logos adopting the product, 38 tape-outs, which is truly unprecedented for a product that was just released.

Eight different process nodes it's being used on and 150-plus active designs. It's been adopted in three different market segments, mobile, server, and GPU. Again, these are the type of customers that they really do care greatly about time to market and the best performance, power, and cost possible to achieve their design. With that, let me transition to the second part of our design platform, which is our custom analog design. Unfortunately, in that area, there hasn't been as much innovation as has happened in digital, I'll say, over the last decade or so. We took advantage of two things. One, that point, that there was hunger toward more innovation in analog. Two, we have a significant, actually, one of the largest analog houses today, analog design houses, sits inside Synopsys, is our IP team.

We partnered with our IP team to figure out what's the fastest and best way to improve analog design productivity. We came with a Custom Compiler as a product that is focused on advanced technology and design productivity, which is very important because if your digital part is moving fast and you're able to be productive, but your analog part is not competitive or productive, then you slow down your entire development. The graph that you're seeing is the trend of increase of adoption of Custom Compiler. Now, granted, you can argue these are small numbers compared to what's available out there. To me, I look at it as a fantastic opportunity to be able to constantly grow and continuously grow along that curve.

There's a very well-known TAM, the differentiation we're providing is something we're incredibly excited about to grow our revenue in that space. With that, let me transition to verification. Think of verification that has 3 layers. There is the analog verification, there is a digital verification, and then there is the hardware emulation or verification. With the analog verification, even though we don't have a number 1 position in analog design, in analog verification, we are absolutely the number 1 leader in that space. In the digital verification, as it states in here, 12 out of the top 15 semiconductor companies uses our digital verification tool called VCS in that space, and we've been the market leader since 2008. On the third layer, the hardware emulation, we've been the market leader since 2016. With that, let me dive into each one of them separately.

As I mentioned, in analog and mixed-signal simulation, we've been the number 1 for many, many years. Maybe some of you have heard the HSPICE or anybody who's done any engineering background have used it. This has been the golden reference for, I believe, 38 some years. More than almost four decades has been the industry golden reference. Why is that important? Everything has to reference to HSPICE. We own HSPICE. It's been that standard for many years. We built on top of it a different level of abstraction for analog and circuit simulation to run much faster while maintaining the accuracy of the golden. With that, let me move to the whole digital verification complexity. Actually, this graph is really are the steps our customers go through in developing a chip. It starts with architecting the chip.

After that step is done, you move into actually developing the hardware. This is where the design tool comes in and some of the verification. When you're well into the hardware design, you start your verification development. When you're almost done with your software development, you start the validation of the software and the hardware and how well are they working together. Are they working together and meet the intent or the architecture of what you've developed? I remember about seven, eight years ago, sitting with one of the leading customers, they challenged us, can we shift left that development where we can do hardware, software development in parallel? If you look at the picture, it's really essentially pulling forward so the customer can ship and go into production at least six to nine months earlier than the previous method of developing a chip.

Here we have some unique differentiation that enabled us to enable that shift of the hardware, software co-verification. Let me explain it a little bit. As you start with an architecture, we have a technology that allows you to prototype the hardware before the hardware design even starts. You prototype what's the intention of the hardware, and then we provide that intention, per se, to the software developers so they can start writing software before the hardware design starts. As you advance into the hardware development, we enable through the emulation, the ability to run the software on an early version of your hardware. Okay? This enablement was possible because of our unique and strong position in every step of the whole verification cycle.

Here is just a set of the who's who customers that they came forward with our relationship with them as it comes to the verification portfolio. You see some of the numbers. I mean, top 5 of the mobile SoC vendors are using our digital verification tool. 18 of the top 20 uses it as well, et cetera. Our strength and that number one position allowed us to integrate and shift left the productivity for our customers so they can ship their chips sooner and validate the functionality as soon as the hardware development starts. There's the third element that is actually playing a significant role in that whole shift left of the development, which is our hardware emulation business. The name of our product here is called ZeBu, and we're in early production and deployment of the Server-4. Two key points.

It's the only system today in the market that allows you and enables you to run your software on an emulation system. The reason, it's a completely different architecture than what's available in the market. It has the highest speed, which when you run software, you need high speed in order to do so. The other point is the capacity is fairly significant of the system, which enables the customer to bring in their entire SoC or chip on that system. Which makes it a low cost of ownership for that system to bring up the software early and to validate the whole hardware, software development and ensure that the $550 million plus investment that our customers are making on these advanced chips, one, they'll work, and two, enables them to get it done much faster.

Just to summarize, the EDA business for Synopsys, as I stated earlier, about 65% of our business. I want to say we're fortunate that we have a strong bridge from silicon to design that gives us an early visibility into the complexity of advanced technology and bring that learning to design. In design, we introduced Fusion Compiler, which is a breakthrough in how customers do the digital design, which provides them much higher speed and time to market advantage, along with a more competitive chip. On the analog side of the design, we're focused on productivity of analog design. As you move to verification, as I just mentioned, the whole hardware, software co-verification is something we invested in about seven years ago, and it's an incredible part of our portfolio that continues on growing very nicely. Thank you for your attention.

With that, I'll move it to Trac.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

Thanks, Sassine. Good morning, everyone. I am Trac Pham, the CFO for Synopsys. Appreciate the chance to share our story today. As you've heard this morning, clearly, the markets that we're in are very healthy. They're growing and present a lot of opportunity for us. Over the last several years, we've been making very significant investments in the entire portfolio. We feel like after this phase, we're well-positioned to capture that opportunity that's ahead of us. Let me describe a little bit of the financial results that have helped us get here, and also how we see it evolving over the next few years. Okay. As I mentioned, over the last five years, it has been a tremendous amount of investments and innovation within Synopsys.

Against that backdrop, we have also delivered very strong results, very consistent growth on the top line and also on earnings. It's very rare when you can talk about a business that's investing, and typically, when you think about a company that's investing, you don't normally see the kind of results that we're showing here. If you were to actually extrapolate over 10 years or 20 years, a very similar trend over a long period of time. Now, there's two things that really help us achieve these results, two significant areas. One is just the business model. We mentioned it earlier in terms of the time-based model that we have. Over 90% of our business is via recurring revenues. That provides a really high level of visibility and stability throughout different cycles.

That visibility, you can see that in Q1 where we showed about $4.3 billion of backlog. This is non-cancellable backlog that if we just stopped everything today, would continue to click off in terms of revenue and cash that we receive. The second thing that's really remarkable about how we're able to execute against this is an execution discipline. One thing that we've done consistently over the years, and we touched a little bit on it earlier as we talked about our expansion to IP and more recently in software integrity, is this focus on delivering both near-term commitments while simultaneously investing for the long term. These consistent results are really a function of us really managing throughout different horizons. Okay. If I go down to the next level, you can really get a sense of the strength of the business.

Whether you look at it from a product perspective as a function of the investments we've made, or you look at it by geographies. Over the last few years, you can see a very broad-based growth in the business. The diversity of the business we talked about, but just the consistency and the depth of the strength of the business. This really allows us to manage through multiple business cycles. I touched a little bit on the business model, but the fact that there's such strength across the business allows us to weather very well. You go back over the past decade, whether you look at the global recession in 2008, 2009, or you think about the large amount, significant amount of M&A activity in the semi space in 2015, 2016.

We were not only able to weather it, but in some cases, came out of those situations much stronger than we did coming in. From a balance sheet perspective, we've actually been very proactive over the last few years in terms of managing our balance sheet. This is certainly a competitive strength for us. This business with the model and with the discipline that we're driving generates a tremendous amount of cash. Over the last four plus years, we've generated over $2 billion of cash, and we've augmented that with some additional debt over that period of time, and we've used that cash and the debt to fund much of the organic investments that you've seen that's driving the results. We've also invested in acquisitions to expand the TAM. We've also returned a significant amount of cash to shareholders via buyback.

Our view here is we want to manage this very proactively, be a little bit more aggressive on it. The key always is when you look at this balance sheet and you look at the P&L, it really is being balanced, managed in a way that we feel is sustainable over time. As I've talked about, for us to continue to deliver the results that we have delivered and that we want to deliver long term, it has to be done in a way that we feel like we can repeat the cycle and sustain the cycle effectively. A little bit more. Our cash over the last few years, you've seen a very strong increase on our cash. We've talked much about the 2018 cash flows, a number of one-time items that we've previously disclosed in our financial supplements.

Overall, the trend is very positive in terms of cash flow increases. For those who are not familiar with the company, cash flows over the long term can be very lumpy depending on the renewals of the business, but typically will track very closely to EBITDA less cash taxes. From a stock buyback perspective, you saw the $1.6 billion over the last four plus years. This is about 100% of free cash flows. A pretty significant amount of cash that we've returned to investors. This balance between organic investments, buybacks, and M&A has created a lot of value over the last few years, and we expect to continue a similar balance going forward. I think, in the next few slides, I'm going to fill in some of the blanks that you're going to see in your presentation, our outlook for the next few years.

We crossed $3 billion last year. It was a pretty significant milestone for us in terms of crossing $3 billion, but our mindset and our focus is definitely on $4 billion as the next milestone. We've talked a lot about the market opportunity. We talked about the investments we've made to really position ourselves to scale up and get to the next billion. What we haven't talked much about, let me touch on a little bit, is that when I talk about our mindset, we really are trying to build a company that endures, a company that can get to the next level. That means our management team, our management and the leadership team that have gotten us here, but also evolving our capabilities so that we can get to that next level.

We look at our back offices, the infrastructure support behind that, the management systems to support that. Across the board, we're looking at how to build not only the technology but the infrastructure that can help us be successful at that next level. We've touched on the revenue model. Over the last few years, last couple of years in particular, we've grown in the low double digits. The model that we highlight here in terms of EDA in the mid to high single digits, IP in the low double digits, and Software Integrity in the roughly 20% range, is a model that we believe can be managed through different cycles.

We've talked about, we've recently raised the EDA model from low to mid, to mid to high, and depending on where we are on the cycle, it may be higher or on the low end of that range, but this is something that we believe can be sustained over multiple periods and through multiple cycles. On a margin perspective, the investments we've made highlights where we've been over the last couple of years, and it really presents an opportunity for us to continue to grow and scale the business. As we look forward, there's definitely an opportunity for us to continue to grow the business while also improving profitability. Structurally, there's an opportunity for us to manage the business on a path to Rule of 40, some combination of revenue growth and margin expansion that can get close to 40%.

As you can see, we've done a pretty good job balancing both revenue growth over the last 5 years of revenue growth and investments in the business. We believe that going forward, we should be able to continue to leverage those investments that drive growth while also driving profitability with a long-term goal in mind of something in the 30% range. Recently, we've talked about driving operating margins up to 26% in 2021. We can see here, looking at where we are with our product portfolio, where we are in terms of thinking about how to scale the business, we're definitely raising the long-term 2021 objectives of high 20s for operating margins. The combination of a very solid growth outlook and an increased focus on operating margins should allow us to drive earnings growth in the low double digits.

This, again, is an increase of where we've been historically. We've done a great job over the past five years of positioning ourselves for long-term growth by investing in the business while also delivering high single-digit earnings growth and meeting that commitment. Given where we are in terms of our investments and the focus going ahead, and the combination of revenue growth and operating margins, we're very optimistic about our ability to drive EPS in the low double digits. As I've talked about, it's certainly going to start with revenues. The outlook for the business is very strong. We'll get some operating leverage based on our revenue growth. Then I talked a little bit about the productivity metrics and where we're focused on terms of the rest of the business.

The technology platforms that we use to run the business, the management practices, the management processes that we're evolving to manage this business at the next billion. The other part is scaling up the Software Integrity business. Andreas talked about the Polaris platform and how we should be able to get some go-to-market leverage there, and also our ability to drive revenue growth through the platform. There's also an opportunity to drive leverage in that business in the back office. Over the past 18 months, we've spent a significant amount of energy and time and money on making sure that we're building a business structure, business processes, and a technology platform that can scale up a business that is different from the traditional EDA and IP business.

We're making a shift from a low volume but high dollar business with a very concentrated set of customers to one where we've got 4,000 plus customers at certainly a different ASP, certainly a different price point. Making sure that we can build the business practices and business process to scale that business and getting operating leverage there on a very high growth business, that should be where we allow that business to both grow and increase profitability over time. We're still in the middle of Q1. We'll end the quarter in just over a month. We reported Q1 results, Q2, sorry. Thank you. We reported Q1 results a few weeks ago. Very strong start to the year, really gives us a strong outlook for the year and so at that point, and today we're reaffirming guidance for Q2 and the full year.

I'll conclude it and say that, as you've heard today, the market opportunity for us is tremendous. It's growing, it's healthy, it's very dynamic. We've been very deliberate over the last five years in terms of making investments across the entire portfolio, to position ourselves to win in this market. You can see that our commitment in terms of continuing to drive the business for growth and operating margins over the long term, we believe can create a lot of value for investors. We're excited and very optimistic about the outlook for the company.

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

Okay. We can invite the speakers up to the, whatever you call those things up there. Would you mind turning off the projector for us?

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

Can you turn this thing off?

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

Yes.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

No seating arrangement.

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

You all can do me a favor and wait till you get the microphone to ask questions. We've got Roberta over here and Lisa over here.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

The question is behind you.

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

Oh, sorry. One and then

Rich Valera
Analyst, Needham

Thank you. Rich Valera from Needham. Trac, would love to get any more color you can provide on your increased target of non-GAAP OM from 26% to high 20s. Is that mainly a better revenue outlook than you thought before or are there other factors driving that improved outlook? Thank you.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

Hi, Rich. Hello? Hello?

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Yeah.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

It's on. Okay, sorry. Rich, it's going to be a combination of both, Rich, both the revenue growth and driven by the strong position that we have in the product portfolio and also an increased focus on the operating side of it.

Mitch Steves
Analyst, RBC

Hey, Mitch Steves, RBC. I think that the high level numbers you put out there suggest mid-teens EPS growth. I'm guessing there's a little bit of wiggle room there, so maybe you could walk us through that. Secondly, for Aart, I think it's pretty difficult to paint a bear case in terms of computing, so I'm wondering what the impact actually of Intel's announcements of cutting some of their headcount is, if that's something you guys expected or if that will impact you guys long term.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

Let me start with the EPS. Mitch, thanks for clarifying that. Mitch's question is around the EPS growth, you're right, it's somewhere in the double digit range. Yes. There's some flex on that depending on where we are with the combination of revenue growth and margin expansion. It's certainly comfortably in the double digit range.

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Regarding any cuts or changes, while we don't like to comment about any individual companies, in general, our markets do this all the time. In most cases, is that people readjust their emphasis from an employee point of view on those area that have the biggest promises. More often than not, when companies make changes, they also look at how can they become more efficient, more effective, and what are the new technologies that they should invest in. From our perspective, our responsibility is, especially during these times of changes, to be a really good supplier and supporter of a company because, A, it will be remembered, but B, because there's an opportunity often to automate certain things. IP reuse is a perfect case in many of these companies or acceleration towards a new technology.

We've been in arguably the most dynamic market in history of mankind in terms of the rate of change. That implies that companies change all the time, and we've survived very well under that.

Matt Coffina
Analyst, Morningstar Investment Management

Hi, Matt Coffina from Morningstar Investment Management. A couple questions for you. I wonder if you could talk about China's homegrown semi industry and the extent to which they're going to be using your EDA tools or the extent to which they might be developing their own tools in the long run. Aart, I heard you talking outside about ASICs and AI and maybe just some thoughts on what you think the end state of that industry is. Are we going to end up with 100 different chip types for every application or are we going to eventually have the Intel or the Arm of AI?

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Okay. Well, starting with China, we're extremely familiar with that because we had the good fortune to be in China very early on, so in the mid-'90s, and actually I visited in the mid-'80s. We have actually lived the rate of change of that industry literally every quarter and have seen its evolution. The most important part of that evolution is not only increasing commitment of the country to high technology, to chips as an underlying set of capabilities, but also to the education of the people to become competent. China is an important part of our market. We look at it in the context of Asia-Pacific, that has grown in general, and you can see it in the numbers that we release on that. We don't disclose China specifically, but certainly, we communicate well about Asia-Pacific.

We see a continuation of that, notwithstanding maybe some of the political challenges that are in play today that we don't control, but have been somewhat far away from us so far. It's interesting in that context to also connect it to your second question, which is AI, because China has invested substantially in that direction, anticipating that AI would be not only a driver for technology, but also a driver for the verticals of the different markets. AI is an interesting space because you say, will it gradually consolidate? Well, we're talking at the very beginning of this, and the beginning, I think, is measured in decades, not in quarters at this point in time. Yes, we're seeing a massive broadening of the number of people doing chips. Some of those are clearly going to be winners.

Some of those, there may be some question marks. In this case, I have no doubt that as some companies may not do as well with chips, they will be absorbed very rapidly into other companies because the talent set is highly valuable and will be reused to do then the next generation, the next generation. By the way, to also split the market up that certain types of AI will become more directed at verticals because the impact is so high if you have something that matches well the type of data. There's really a lot of opportunity in that space, and it's a market we are touching quite well.

Speaker 14

Thanks, [Liz Sauer]. A couple technology questions for Aart and Sassine. In Core EDA, we often hear about the lifespan of a hardware platform like ZeBu and others lasting several years. The question has to do with the lifespan of software platform in Core EDA. If you go back to the years after you bought Avanti, took you about four or five years to fully integrate that. That culminated in ICC. That took you through the next 10 years or so, and now you've got Fusion as a platform. How do you think about the longevity and extensibility of that as your new platform over the next number of years? Additionally, many of the new opportunities you talked about, like 5G, IoT, automotive, and so forth, would seem to be inherently custom and analog mixed signal problems to solve at the chip and systems level.

Yet you are a distant number 2 in custom overall. The question is: do you think that customers will increasingly lead their tool and vendor selections with custom, where perhaps in the past it was led by digital? Do you think this kind of customer selection dynamic might be led more by custom given these new opportunities rather than what we've seen in the past?

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Maybe I'll answer the longevity, then Sassine can give you the exciting parts that we're specifically encountering right now. It's actually a very good observation that in hardware, just as in software, you have sort of phases. In software, the first thing to not forget, we're in a very strange field where you cannot forget a single lesson you ever learned. If there's some technology insight that happened in 1997, if we forget that insight, no chip will work today because everything is cumulative.

At the same time, the notion of fundamental architectural shifts is a necessity because every so often you need to rethink how you do the learning, especially in the context right now of having machine learning possible, of having very massive amounts of data possible in a computation, i.e., very broad platform, and in the context of this notion of fusion that I think is remarkably innovative because it takes different tools and says, "Let me take the different sub-pieces of it and see by mixing them up in a different recipe, can I create a better meal? Can I create better chips more rapidly?" That's what we're doing. We have entered now this Fusion platform, which I think is at least a decade, if not more, of runway for us. We have, by the way, the same in verification.

We have a platform there that started a couple of years ago that includes the hardware. Andreas has started the Polaris platform. I think these investments that were massive, both in pieces and in assembling something, I think are all looking at least a decade of runway.

Sassine Ghazi
SVP and Co-General Manager, Design Group, Synopsys

Yeah, it's exactly what Aart said. By putting everything on the same data model, it's enabling us to innovate and bring in more technology on that data model. For example, test. We announced something incredibly exciting around test, which is essential for the automotive market. How do you do functional safety design, built on top of that Fusion platform? Yes, I do see it as for the next decade type of a platform to innovate and build on top of. Your second part of your question was around analog design. If you look today, analog design, it really lags behind digital from a process technology evolution and push. As I stated, there hasn't been much innovation or well-needed innovation to bring analog design productivity faster, and that's what we're focused on. Custom Compiler for us, we had to transition.

The transition to FinFET, that's where we focused, and the productivity of analog. Do we see a ramping and more content of analog on advanced technology? The answer is yes.

Speaker 18

I think the other part of that question was, will customer decisions be led by analog design? Also you want to bring in the analog simulation leadership as well?

Sassine Ghazi
SVP and Co-General Manager, Design Group, Synopsys

Yeah. I don't think it's led by analog design. No, it hasn't. I don't see it that it's happening. The productivity of analog still care about for our customer. As far as simulation, bringing the verification of the SoC together, that's really very complex. Even though each one of them, analog versus digital, are developed on different technology, the verification happens simultaneously. You want to verify the entire SoC together, this is where we lead in terms of the verification of both analog and digital.

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Maybe if I can add a macro generalization on top of that. If nothing else, you should take away from today, that Synopsys has invested in a whole bunch of fundamental technologies, deep down up from the physics to the silicon, but also now from the software applications down from the intersection of hardware and software. It sounds like a little of a analytical expression, but this notion of moving from scale complexity, meaning you do the same thing, but more and more and more and more and more, with one O or two Os, how you want to look at it, meaning more and more transistors, has now moved into a realm of systemic complexity, the intersection of fundamental technologies.

What is exciting for us about that is by being very proficient in these different areas, there are certain intersections that are suddenly going to turn into the make or break of entire product families because if one aspect doesn't work well with the other, the product is not going to go to market or will not be safe or will not be viable. That is how Synopsys is sort of broadening its overall TAM as it's coming about, while at the same time remaining technology very deep and leadership. Hopefully, that came across a little bit, by virtue of seeing and hearing the diversity of the pieces that we have today.

Tom Diffely
Analyst, D.A. Davidson

Hi, Tom Diffely with D.A. Davidson. Couple of software integrity questions. How do you move from the $2 billion SAM today to the $5 billion-$6 billion TAM over time? Is that acquisitions, or can you do that with your portfolio? Because you started to focus on the margins, what do you think that's done to the growth rate for you in that space?

Andreas Kuehlmann
Co-General Manager, Software Integrity Group, Synopsys

Okay. To the first question, we certainly look at our portfolio itself. There's really a lot of momentum to gain there. A lot of opportunities out there, customers that don't do anything in terms of software security or software quality. We see really that as one opportunity. Of course, we always look at organically and non-organically, how we can invest and grow the portfolio. This is something we constantly do, and that is something you will see going forward. To the second question, in terms of the margin, I think we constantly sort of really thought the balance, the drive opportunity as well as driving the margin forward. Right now, you saw the number in terms of 20% that we are aiming for. If there's more opportunity build to take this, maybe this is also something Patrick can comment on.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

I do want to comment on that because over the last 18 to 24 months, Andreas and I have been working very closely on how we scale up that business. When you ask that question about margin, it's as if you're trading off growth and margin, and actually over the recent period, what we've been trying to do is accelerate both, right? This focus on removing friction from our processes, right? Keep in mind, we've spent 25 years in a certain space with a certain business model, and trying to build this within in-house, there's a lot of friction that's not well-suited for that business. Removing the friction in terms of how we operate internally, from our business processes, putting in a completely new technology platform to run that business.

Thinking about how we support that business as it scales up, is actually in support of both growth and operating margin. We're very confident about how we're going to scale that up. Now going forward, as we see the opportunities for both the market evolving and as we see margins improving, we will look closely at it to find out what is the right balance to manage that to create the most value. I feel like we've made investments both in the product side and technology side and on the business side that will allow us and put us in position where we can make that trade-off effectively.

Jason Celino
Analyst, Keybanc Capital Markets

Right here. Jason Celino from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Kind of building off that last question, as we kind of think about the profitability of the SIG business, it looks like at least a quarter of the SIG business revenue comes from some sort of consulting services. As we think of the gross margin structure of that services business, would that resemble typical services gross margins?

Andreas Kuehlmann
Co-General Manager, Software Integrity Group, Synopsys

Just first of all, if you look at scaling up the business on the services part and as outlined in the talk, is really think about it as a grease, right? Think about it as an enabler, essentially, how we can essentially sell more technology and broader solutions on that. That does not mean that the services will necessarily grow in the same ratio as on the product side. Ultimately, when you look at the maturing process of customers, the most mature customers really use automation, in their dev, SecOps operations. They focus on products, they focus really getting the automation and peace whereas the earliest-

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Andreas, your mic is not working really well. Can you pull it up, see if it's connected?

Andreas Kuehlmann
Co-General Manager, Software Integrity Group, Synopsys

Let me hold it.

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Use this. That's better. Sorry.

Andreas Kuehlmann
Co-General Manager, Software Integrity Group, Synopsys

While on the earliest stage of the maturing process, this is really customers where they need more help, right, in terms of consulting.

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Yeah.

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

I'll add to that. That's a conversation that we have on an ongoing basis, right? Again, putting in the infrastructure to support the services business. Again, this business was the acquisition that we made in the services side. The business had a long history. It was doing very well. Very well-recognized and a great brand name, it was operating as a startup. Building the infrastructure support, scale up the services business is one focus. The other part Andreas highlighted is as we go to business, it is intended to really come in there in a very specific way, both strategically to have that conversation, to drive products, also engage with the customers at a much more strategic level.

We'll manage the services in order to grow it profitably, the real emphasis is on making sure of how it fits in with a broader portfolio in terms of how it drives the product side.

Speaker 16

Hi, this is Francois from Bamburgh. I had one question for John about the IP business. You talk about the building blocks and also creating subsystems for your customers. From their perspective, is the real value you provide to them, these building blocks or the subsystems you make for them, and if it is the latter, is that a more capital-intensive process, and is that margin dilutive at all?

John Koeter
VP, IP Group, Synopsys

Okay. Yeah. In terms of where we are in that transition here, just the individual protocols themselves are getting more and more complex. As I mentioned, going from USB 3.1 or whatever to USB4 gets intrinsically more complex. The standards are evolving. They're getting more complex and that's good for us for multiple reasons, as I said in our presentation. They are also asking us to provide larger blocks of IP that are more integrated and to answer your questions, of course, we don't comment about specific margins or anything like that, but what we do along those lines is very tightly integrated to our IP and, therefore, has the same kind of value profile, I would say.

Speaker 17

John, Peter with Credit Suisse. Just going back to the op margins. On the 2021 target of high 20s, where do you see the Software Integrity margins at that point? At scale, how do you think about that business five, 10 years down the road from an operating margin perspective? Just holistically at the overall business, raising target to 30% is good, but if I look at the value that you bring, why isn't that number significantly higher? If I look at the R&D spend, I don't think anyone in the audience would fault you in reinvesting in R&D, but why isn't there more leverage in the SG&A business? Especially if I add back stock-based comp, even at 30% target, you're really at sort of a mid-20s. You look at some of your chip company customers, and they're sitting at 35%, 40%, 45% op margins.

Why isn't there significantly more leverage in the model longer term?

Trac Pham
CFO, Synopsys

Okay, let me start with the first part of that, which is Software Integrity. Structurally, this business is an enterprise software company offering with a focus on security. Long term, I would expect it to be at the corporate average or higher, right? Similar to what you would see in other enterprise software companies. Where it is in 2021, that really will depend on what will deliver the most value in terms of where the growth profile is, right? We are managing to a combination of revenue growth and operating margins. We happen to be in a very high growth area, and we're well-positioned for that. So we will continue to look at that balance. Structurally long term, we think this could be a very profitable business.

As far as operating leverage, if you look at the portfolio and the challenge that we're managing, right? We're managing along a time dimension, delivering today, delivering for tomorrow, many years from now, right? Managing that time horizon. We're managing a very complex portfolio of EDA, IP, and Software Integrity, right, with different growth profiles and they are at different points in their life cycle, right? The goal there is we believe we can get to this margin profile that we discussed. We're certainly on a path to that, progressing from last year to this year, and you could see that trajectory. As that evolves and that can improve, we'll certainly look at it, our one thing that you should take out of this presentation today, it's really a balance.

It's a balanced portfolio, it's a balanced horizon, and we're trying to manage that in a way that we will create the most value. We are looking very closely at all elements of the company to drive more productivity, more efficiencies. Hence, we're increasing our outlook for 2021. If we can make improvements on that and it's faster, then we'll certainly talk to it. Right now, we feel like that's the best balance of creating value for our shareholders.

Speaker 14

Thank you.

Mitch Steves
Analyst, RBC

Just one quick follow-up with the strategy. One of the interesting slides you had in there is how you basically build out a new portfolio every time and see the growth rate get to mid-single digits from EDA to semi-IP, now to software integrity. I'm not expecting you guys to give me exactly what you're going to do in 5 years, but if I were to look out 3-5 years, what type of technologies do you think could be ancillary or interesting? Because it's clear that you guys have been good predictors in the past. What type of technology would be ancillary for the EDA space, or would it be more software integrity and so on and so forth?

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Well, we approach these type of questions with a certain degree of caution, obviously, because, A, we don't want to signal what we would be doing, but also because right now we have just started a journey in an area that has enormous promise and also many side ramifications. By the time you touch the software world, you can look at many things from productivity to the quality of the software, to the embedding into the hardware, to the security questions, how they relate to both, and most importantly, to the intersection between the two. In all of those, there's at least one common point, which is faster computation is still unbelievably valuable. When I described earlier that we're now in the midst of this engine that says, "I'm an AI algorithm. What do I want? A faster computer. I'm a faster computer. What am I looking for?

AI algorithm that can use me." That says there's going to be a narrowing down to many different architectures for AI that will have direct impact over this entire picture that we're looking at. When we emphasize the systemic intersection between all of those fields, I think part of our thinking guided forward will be to look at which verticals can actually adopt this really fast and benefit from it, and which verticals are very large in terms of the impact it would have. Fast adoption and large size are not always the same. It's going to be a balancing of looking how do we move up from where we are, which is the natural growth of any company, do something for your customer that you didn't used to do before. Customers sometimes resist that.

No, that's my job." IP, they said that, and then it became less of their job because we're moving up the value chain. In that sense, the picture we're painting for the first time in the last three, four years, we've actually have people that are specialized for verticals to understand those. Some are in the SIG area, be it in the finance area or health or so. Some are across the company, such as automotive. We always had the computation communication. That is how we're going to continue to look at that picture. That ties directly to the previous question, which is this balance between maximizing our profitability while assuring that on the multiple time constants, we invest well for the future that's ahead.

Having just come out, literally out of 5 years of fairly massive investments, both in terms of acquisitions and significant platform development, we feel that now we're in a good stage to say, "Okay, let's run with that, tighten up the company every possible way from a profitability point of view," but never forget that we're building for the long term. The long term, and that's one of the nice things, we have many different time constants. We're more diversified. We're more stable. We have a business model that has a majority of ratability. All of these say, well, it's a very solid company moving forward at the heart of the intersection of all these wonderful technologies.

Speaker 14

Thanks, Lisa. Jeff Lisa. 2 questions for Aart and Trac. First, a number of your peers in software, including in particular design software, speak about the eventuality of consumption-based models beyond subscription models. My question is therefore, excluding IP, for which there is already some component of consumption in the model, do you see any room, whether for core EDA or perhaps for SIG, that you might eventually over time layer in a kind of consumption or on the meter type of model as opposed to just a straight subscription for tools kind of a model? Secondly, once upon a time at a meeting like this, you spoke about account-based profitability as a management tool, something that you looked at closely. This is long before SIG, and it was an EDA reference at the time.

Now all these years later, is that something that you think is important or will become increasingly important, particularly when you look at the resource and services requirements associated with SIG?

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

At any point in time, looking again and again at business models is important. Some of that is being also suggested in the context of having more cloud adoption, which is really an elaboration on the compute environment for the customers. Cloud is not free, meaning if you use more computers, you spend more time on it. The question is more, does that shift

The utilization model to go more towards spikes rather than an ongoing utilization. That will probably bring about some evolution of the pricing packaging model. Although customers are going to be very careful before they do that, because they themselves will be worried that some engineering group suddenly is going to have these huge spikes that were unexpected. While initially that sounds all great, gradually they will enforce their own economic models. Regarding the notion of account profitability, we're quite careful with that, because accounts have many different dimensions of goodness to us. Of course, if you continually lose money with some customers because you have to support them no end, you will gradually decide, well, can we evolve the model so that it's a little bit more balanced?

Sometimes we also do things for customers because they actually teach us, or they drive us into the next generation in a fashion that's positive. In general, the bigger customers and the customers that drive more of the state-of-the-art are economically well-balanced with us. Actually, I can't point to customers where I would be in complaining mode. We're in thankful mode for what we can do. We move our resources where we see the opportunities, and we've always done so, both economically and technically.

Jay Huck
Analyst, Egerton Capital

Yes. Hello. Hi, Jay Huck from Egerton. Quick question on, you haven't spoken much about pricing today. Can you talk about how that's evolved, if at all, in your model? Also, what component, if at all, does that factor into the higher margin targets you've laid out today?

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

Sure. Pricing is actually de facto linked to how sophisticated are you in terms of what you offer. Do you have something that's better than the competition? In the history of EDA, fundamentally, it's always been, well, here's the next release. It's so much better. The price will go up somewhat for that. Over time, the customer buys more and more copies. There's some discounting that occurs. We have pushed for essentially run rate increases with our customers as we de facto provide way more value. Now, that value has to be commensurate to how they can fund their own projects. There's somewhat of a natural balance that occurs there. If you don't have unique capabilities, then you don't have pricing power with the customer. That race is always on.

Fortunately, we have a number of products that are quite unique, that are well-established, and keeping a balanced relationship for multiple years with the customer is actually as important as optimizing in the moment. Again, for Synopsys, I don't have any complaints about our customers.

Rich Valera
Analyst, Needham

Thanks. Question, I think this is for Sassine on Fusion Compiler. You mentioned that it had an unprecedented customer ramp-up. I'm wondering if you can put any context around that relative to IC Compiler II or IC Compiler. Also, 10 years in the making sounds like some pretty huge technological innovations. Can you give us a sense of what this does for you guys competitively? If you can give us any sense of how that might change the competitive landscape. Thanks.

Sassine Ghazi
SVP and Co-General Manager, Design Group, Synopsys

Absolutely. As I mentioned, it's really transforming digital design, meaning the way our customers today develop digital SoC, they develop it along three pillars, the synthesis, place and route, and sign-off. This is the only product available in the industry today that enables the customer to blend these lines and go from synthesis to sign-off back and forth as they're developing their SoC. The adoption, when we engage customers, as I mentioned, the number of logos, number of tape-outs, they saw it as a huge productivity tool for them to bring their SoC time to market shorter and deliver to better power performance and area.

From a ramp-up point of view, I do see it as the platform today that we've seen some revenue growth, some adoption growth, et cetera, due to the introduction of it, but it will ramp up absolutely over time for the next number of years, and that's where we're going to add a number of technologies on top of that platform to deliver to it. Did I answer your question?

Rich Valera
Analyst, Needham

How about relative to IC Compiler II or get any context of that?

Sassine Ghazi
SVP and Co-General Manager, Design Group, Synopsys

Yes. Thank you. ICC II was the next generation of place and route. There was a natural transition from the previous generation to the next generation. We still have very strong investment in ICC II as a place and route technology. This is a whole new category of products. The ramp-up is very different than I'm going from one place and route to the next place and route versus I'm transforming the way I'm doing my digital design.

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

Any other questions?

Speaker 15

Maybe one more quick question for Graham and maybe for Andreas as well. Graham, I'm assuming you've had a long relationship with Synopsys in both designing hardware and now writing software as well. I'm just wondering, given the importance of software, and I think software integrity is going to be extremely important going forward, especially as more software gets embedded in hardware and there are safety requirements, et cetera. I'm just wondering, is software integrity and the things you do with Synopsys, is that something that you would look to bring on additional vendors so that you can not have a sole source? Would you want to have multiple software integrity vendors so that you can verify your software from multiple dimensions. For Andreas, are there any holes, do you think, in your software verification offerings that you need to fill? Thank you.

Graham Holmes
Senior Director, Advanced Security Initiatives Group, Cisco

Shall I start? Yeah. Thank you. As a software security guy, I totally agree that software security is a very important thing for us to be focused on and will be part of what we do. I tried to mention in my presentation that we look to best-in-class tools to meet our needs to develop secure solutions and deliver at speed. Often, what we try to do is, we have two challenges. One is we have over 400 products that we release every year, 70 clouds that we're operating. We're acquiring new companies every year. We have both things that we've invested in and things that other teams have invested in as they were acquired. Part of what we do is constantly evaluate what's best in class. There are certain parts of software development that are consistent across whatever we do from an offer model perspective.

Therefore, there's going to be consistency in the tools that we use there. New technologies, new ways to deliver product are always introducing new capabilities that are needed, or identifying new capabilities that are needed and new products that help solve that from everything from open source to commercially available products. It's our responsibility to constantly look for what's the best in class. Our long history with Synopsys has been, there are things that we believe that they continue to deliver on because their investment on that are critical and vital to our basic secure development.

Andreas Kuehlmann
Co-General Manager, Software Integrity Group, Synopsys

Yeah. Touching on the second part of the question. First of all, think about this as an emerging industry, and it's a very vibrant industry. It's almost like the early days of EDA, right? In the early days, we just had a simulator to validate a chip. We developed many more technologies that complement. We see that the same way in the Software Integrity, right? Essentially the emerging technologies as they come, we constantly look at these technologies, whether we develop them organically, whether we look at them externally. I think one point that is very important, and I tried to mention that in the talk, is our consulting service, as well as the deep partnership we have with our customers, keeps us really on the frontier of understanding the problems, and understanding the problems and trying to solve solutions.

In a consulting business, could be in the beginning, just something we do manually, right? If you see the same problems three times, it sounds like a good idea to put in some product, right? Working with partners, deep partners like Cisco, we also understand where they're going and where their needs are. This is critical for us to really stay ahead of everybody.

Aart de Geus
Chairman and Co-CEO, Synopsys

If I may add one comment. Many things are very similar to EDA. Actually, in the field of software, just like in EDA, we have to move much more towards correct by construction, meaning you don't write software and then you figure out things after the fact what's wrong. At least anything that can be automated, that can be checked formally, completely should be done so. There's one difference, though. When EDA came about, there were a lot of physical challenges, complexity challenges, but there were no bad guys that would proactively figure out a way to screw up your circuit. We're surrounded by incredibly intelligent people that have as a mission to do something to your system to invade it, perturb it, or what have you.

That gives a very interesting dynamic which says, hey, with Cisco, with Graham, for example, we better stay pretty close in figuring out what's happening, what's new, what new dangers are about, and how do we either protect or diagnose them when they happen and then fix them after the fact quickly. This has its own sparks, so to speak.

Lisa Ewbank
VP of Investor Relations, Synopsys

We are at the bottom of the hour. We want to thank everybody on the webcast who's listening. We're going to continue to have lunch here. What we're going to do is move together two tables and have one exec at each table. You're welcome to go out, grab lunch, drinks, coffee, and bring it back in and sit with whomever you like. We'll put the place cards where they're going to be. Okay? Thank you.