Ansys and Fluent today announced that Ansys will buy Fluent. For more information see the news announcement here at CFD Online.

What do you guys think about this? Will we finally get modern bug-free CFD codes, or does will the new deal create a dragon that will kill all innovation? Will the CFX code or the Fluent code survive the deal?

I'm quite curious how two competing codes can be owned by the same company? Does this mean that CFX will become part of Fluent? Secondly Fluent has Gambit/Tgrid as a mesh generator and Ansys has ICEM - Is Fluent going to do away with their mesh generator?

I'm not really keen on this because for as long as there was competition - all software developers were on their toes. Now 1 company has two CFD codes - Competition is being reduced. I think it's the customers who may lose out.

I got the news directly from Fluent's COO yesterday morning.

And it was really surprising for me, since I thought that ANSYS did its strategic buy already with CFX. Now I wonder what ANSYS will do with CFX, since two CFD-Codes with the same market target don't seem to be reasonable.

Further on the antitrust authority must still give its ok, I think. And maybe they ask ANSYS for selling CFX first ...

What I hope is that Fluent's activities on the bottle neck sector of grid-generation will not be given up with respect to ICEM, which already belongs to Ansys.

Cash rich giant buying market share through acquisition, not an uncommon strategy. Wonder if the strategy extends to software integration? They did a fast job getting CFX integrated with Design Space, maybe they've done it in such a way as to enable the grid/solver to be easily swapped out? Odds on that they'll keep the Fluent solver but incorporate the turbo machinery focus from CFX. Then retire, or at least not onwardly develop, CFX.

Yeh, the real fear is that such a monster company will not promote healthy innovation through competition. With the CFD vendor order now being Ansys->CD->Flomerics I wonder what form further vendor consolidation might take?

I think that the next big consolidation wave in the CAE sector will include the CAD companies. My guess is that in 10 years time we will be able to run both stress analysis and CFD (with high-end simulation tools) inside softwares like UniGraphics, ProEngineer and CATIA.

We might see some quickly improved integration between Ansys and Fluent, but after that I think a new code will be developed. Fluent is well on the way with their "next generation" flow solver so that might be used as a base, or perhaps they decide to scrap it all and start from new. Anyone familiar with the product generations in the Ansys family of codes? Have CFX got a "next generation" solver in the works already or are they still fine-tuning their current solver (which is a few years newer than Fluent's current solver)?

Ansys has not been historically very big on 'next generation' development since John Swanson left. They typically buy new things and then integrate them.

In fact, You don't need to be bothered about creating anything new if you have enough money to buy whatever you want. Ansys has swallowed his competitors buying the most known CFD softwares and now Ansys has got the monopoly desired. I'll not be surprised if in few years I see some message in this forum saying that Ansys bought Star-CD, Gila, Acusin, etc...

they could just call the product "CFD" and be done with it!

Yeah, the next step will be Ansys patenting the word CFD...

CFD-Online will have to pay royalties to Ansys or change his name (LOL)

NGCFD = next generation cfd ...

Dassault buying CD would be the obvious choice, failing that, Nika or BRNI.

well the rumour was that dasault were going for fluent (guess that one was a little wide of the mark) so maybe dss will turn their attention elsewhere

STAR-DSS maybe??

Hands up who has had a pleasant working relationship with Dassult.

I feel buying and integrating of Fluent by Ansys would not be appreciable of good for CFD analysis

There should be rival products and Fluent has got a good amount of analysis capabilities as comapared to the otherr CFD products

Anyway its corporate decisions and money matters

We CFD users would love to have a ful fledged Analysis package hope so the ANSYS and Fluent comnbination would give us

Hope this does not become the windows of CFD . We might end up downloading patches.

As an ex adapco who spent two years at Northrop Grumman listening to designers curse Catia on an hourly basis I think cd-adapco and Dassault would be an amusing match. But its very unlikely that the French could Negotiate succesfully with the Big Mac. Dr Gossman perhaps but himself, unlikely.

Ah, this is when I miss John Chein's posts. Does it really matter whose bicycle we ride or some such....

Perhaps Dassault will make a modern move and incorporate OpenFoam, now that would be interesting!

- Andy R

CFX and Gambit will be in trouble i guess. Also job cuts in both organisations possible world wide.

There is no such thing as a bug-free code, no matter how much deveoplment and money is poured into it.

If one looks at history like Fluent purchasing FIDAP what will happen is that they will support multiple codes for a long time but slowly migrate users over to one code. The losing code will likely be kept around until all its unique features are transferred over. It does not make business sense to fully support 2 general purpose CFD codes.

I wonder if Fluent will be sold and supported through a reseller network like CFX?

Can some one who understands these numbers explain how a business that had revenues of $158M in 2005 can afford $560M ($300M cash, borrowing $200M from banks, balance in stock) to purchase a company that had $122M in revenues ? That seems like a lot to swallow ! Are these numbers real or are they inflated somehow?

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix....7813&highlight=

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix....7798&highlight=