Hi Lsun,I posted about Tasking a little while back. It had to...

Hi Lsun,

I posted about Tasking a little while back. It had to go, was bought many years back, 2001 ? maybe as
part of Nick Martins dream of the whole FPGA direction, as a compiler for the soft cores. The FPGA
direction was a huge mistake, and Altium spent a huge amount of effort, time and money chasing it.

Altium finally dropped the FPGA product a couple of years back, and had no real use for the Tasking
product anymore. The team built Tasking up again, after being mostly neglected as far as growing its
business outside of the internal FPGA requirements. As seen by the more recent results. But is is just
a distraction to the company, and they have plenty to focus on in the core business. It looks to me
like the sold it for a reasonable amount, based on it's share of income v percentage of market cap.

Re the sales, that whole area is complex, old school EDA tool sales was, taking people to lunch, wine
and dine. Much of the software business is now shrink wrap style, just click online and buy, mostly no
manual sales work. Altium has customers in both areas, most the bigger sales will still need the old
school method. I don't have a whole lot of knowledge on the day to day process. The company have
been working on this for a number of years now, and are still tweaking it over time. With the bottom
line, to grow sales and they have been growing sales well for many years. The 365 product is yet a
different animal again, which will require new methods to be integrated into the sales system.