Ada Vendor Competitveness

Ada Vendor Competitveness

[Ken Garlington]

FYI: The June 3, 1996 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology
includes an extensive article titled "Index of Competitiveness," where
they took various financial criteria and attempted to rank various
aerospace companies and their suppliers as to their ability to satisfy
more customers at a higher level of profit than their competition.

Although I'm a little skeptical of their methodology (and AW&ST did
also mention some flaws in their approach), I thought it was interesting
that the #19 position on the list was held by Rational Software Corp.,
the only Ada vendor to make the list (unless you want to count
#34, Texas Instruments Corp [Tartan], or #62, Logicon Inc.). The overall 
rank was based on 1995 vs. 1994 data, and was a composite of several 
ratings including earnings, RONA, working capital productivity, etc. Of 
the five companies that had improved the most since 1985, Motorola was 
#1, TI was #2 and Rational was #3.

Has anyone looked at doing a similar comparison among Ada vendors in 
general?

-- 
LMTAS - "Our Brand Means Quality"

Re: Ada Vendor Competitveness

[Dave Wood]

Ken Garlington wrote:
> 
> FYI: The June 3, 1996 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology
> includes an extensive article titled "Index of Competitiveness," where
> they took various financial criteria and attempted to rank various
> aerospace companies and their suppliers as to their ability to satisfy
> more customers at a higher level of profit than their competition.
> 
> Although I'm a little skeptical of their methodology (and AW&ST did
> also mention some flaws in their approach), I thought it was interesting
> that the #19 position on the list was held by Rational Software Corp.,
> the only Ada vendor to make the list (unless you want to count
> #34, Texas Instruments Corp [Tartan], or #62, Logicon Inc.). The overall
> rank was based on 1995 vs. 1994 data, and was a composite of several
> ratings including earnings, RONA, working capital productivity, etc. Of
> the five companies that had improved the most since 1985, Motorola was
> #1, TI was #2 and Rational was #3.
> 
> Has anyone looked at doing a similar comparison among Ada vendors in
> general?
> 
> --
> LMTAS - "Our Brand Means Quality"


Presumably this comparison only included publicly-held 
companies making it of very limited value WRT Ada vendors.
Worse, vendors tend to have more than just one product
line, and the granularity of published data is likely 
to not be at the right level to answer your question.

-- Dave Wood
-- Windows Product Manager
-- Thomson Software Products
-- http://www.thomsoft.com