It is confirmed news....

Yes! For a Previous ANSYS CFX guy, this is great news!

So you got the email shot too then. I thought it was spam at first.

lol, ok... so I'm not the only one who throught it was spam...

I'll be interested to see what happens... is it really a merger, or are we seeing an end to Fluent and a domination by CFX?

I also received a simialr mail. Is it for true? KP

I went to ANSYS website and they confirm this news

You have be kidding. The question is if you are seeing an end to CFX. Fluent's customer base is many times larger. If they kill off one, its not going to be Fluent.

I have no doubt that CFX will incorporate some of the features of Fluent and that Fluent will be maintained for at least a while. But both tools are LARGE tools to maintain, so eventually you have to bring the two tools together and the question is if the resultant tool is mostly Fluent or mostly CFX? And this doesn't always have to do with what's the best from a technical standpoint... sometimes a company will acquire someone just to limit their competition. There may be some give and take on sharing features, but in the long run it was about gaining control of the market. And sometimes there's a little bit of 'ego' involved... Hopefully in the end we get a blend of the best of both programs... but only time will tell if that will really be the case. IMHO of course...

Jason

Can someone post a link to this story for me please, I tried the ansys website yet couldn't find any articles relating to this.

From Ansys website/news/more: http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir...item_id=817798

Hi Guys, I agree and appreciate Jason's point of view. I hope the new version should incorporate the advanced features of both the giants. KP

they have bought STAR-CD now have they?

dont spread rumours about star now...

I do not think that it is so. This is a kind of trick to force the market. See the link bellow:

http://www.fluent.com/about/news/pr/pr119.htm

hm, it's difficult to say whether is good idea or not? But I think there be a competition instead of monopoly. Mr Cash is going all round to bully the small guys. Fluent might not have a choice considering the combining forces of ANSYS group. if you cann't compete then you join the winning team. After using both software I think each one has its own pros and cons and merging can be great idea. Free market has to decide the way forward.

hey, guys this might also be one of sepculations for stock investors. if you hold stocks in fluent then you might want to wait for a while since buying them can add few bucks into your portfolio!! let's wait and ....

Fluent is not publicly traded, but buying ANSYS stock is a pretty good bet. It jumped $2.00 with the news this morning and is up by 3.07 (6.96%) as of 4:30 PM EST(see http://www.google.com/search?oi=stoc...&q=stocks:ANSS).

-Guy

This is a terrible news, (unless you're a stock investor). It will halt development of both great softwares in the next couple of years, so they can "integrate" these two beast.

Take a look at CFX and how it has progressed. Holes are everywhere.

BAD news for CFD in general. STAR CD, or AVL must be rubbing their hands in glee.

I agree. This will prevent competition to drive technology forward. This is quite upsetting.

To be honest I have never liked CFX, it doesnt look like a proper CFD tool to me anymore lol. Honestly, all those automatic meshing etc is no good to us at all. I still prefer the good old meshing days, ANSA and T-Grid rules!!!

Infact the only bit I am happy about the merger is that you can use ICEM inctead of Gambit which is great. Fluent also came up with this Fluent for CATIA thing, I dont know what is going to happen to that?

Alan.

Very very very interesting stuff going on! I was just thinking a couple of days ago about the future of CFD, its market, and its users.

To me, it is more of a battle between Finite Element and Finite Volume. For one thing, the FEM has been around for quite a while and it offers unsurpassed flexibility but of course lacks some of the good stuff mechanical, aerospace (and the like) engineers love to have. While the FVM has been around for almost half a century, it is growing fast and research because of its superior conservation properties, and mostly its close mimic of the terms we understand as ME or AE engineers (and the like of course).

Now merging the two companies... it is a kind of pretty shocking news! I personally prefer to keep the competition going on, so that science will eventually decide which method survives, and not the stock market. Competition is very good because it will keep research going on in both areas, which means more research opportunities and fun stuff to do.

Now my speculation is that Fluent will always be fluent and will always use the FVM, but will simply be part of the ANSYS suite.

The big question is whether we really want CFD to be a real commodity for everybody around the planet, just like word processing or does a user have to learn a minimum about CFD like what kind of equations are being solved to correctly setup a given model...