When I was trying to raise capital for my new company, a venture capitalist asked me what the average duration of the sales cycles was in EDA. On hearing the answer - 3 to 6 months - he commented, "Something should be done about it".

Given the less-than-robust EDA market, it's imperative to re-examine the current sales process. Our collective goal as vendors should be to streamline the sales process and remain customer-centric at the same time.

Often, end-users have the budgets for EDA tools, but choose not to use it. Many customers aren't sufficiently convinced of a tool's functionality and value to proceed with the sale. The sales process definitely needs to be reformed to achieve better growth; it has to become more proactive and user-friendly. The current process is unnecessarily long, tedious, and unproductive.

A typical tool evaluation by a customer generally involves the following steps: requirement specifications; paper evaluation; product evaluation, and feedback to the vendor. One of the most important aspects of the sales process is the product evaluation. Many companies spend months or years making a decision. Considerable time and resources are spent at this stage, both by the evaluation team and the vendor.

Traditional tool evaluations have involved the customer installing the software on-site and then proceeding with the evaluation. This process, however, frequently runs into hurdles: software installation problems due to either customer machine configuration; the customer's inability to complete the evaluation within the allotted time, requiring a license extension; and time-consuming downloading of vendor updates.

We believe that web-based tool evaluation addresses all of these issues while adding significant value to the overall sales process. The strategy can shorten the evaluation period from months to days. Additionally, the web's platform neutrality, universal presence, and easy accessibility make it the channel of choice. Look at the advantages. Customers don't perform any on-site installation, the vendor makes all updates to the software, and the software is available to the customer on demand.

We strongly believe in the web-based evaluation model and offered our initial product release for evaluation online. Considering the competitive landscape, we had to find innovative ways to get our software into the hands of designers, bypassing traditional sales strategies. We focussed on making the evaluation process more intuitive, efficient, and simpler, to attract designers who would see our offering as a viable alternative.

We went the same route when launching our second product. We put together an evaluation platform that included examples, users manuals, FAQs, and the ability to read in user-specified files to allow users to test the tool on their own designs.

Our experience with web-based evaluation has been extremely positive. It has repeatedly generated numerous qualified leads and customers. Designers are often comfortable enough after evaluating online to ask for a price quote. In many cases, web-based evaluation serves as a qualifying step for an on-site evaluation. The scheme has also reduced overhead due to the reduced pre-sales support costs. We have reached a large audience based on relatively few postings and press releases. Most importantly, the strategy has served as a morale booster for our company.

Certainly, the web platform comes with a set of challenges, both technical and non-technical. On the technical front, bandwidth may be a problem, especially if extremely large designs have to be used as input.

The hardware and transfer speed has to be fast enough to make the evaluation run in a reasonable amount of time. On the customer front, many users may be unwilling to try the web-based evaluation due to privacy or security concerns.

A web-based evaluation is a natural precursor to application software hosting. Remote software hosting comes with a host of advantages, the main ones being 24x7 software availability, flexible-pricing models, and reduced maintenance costs.

Companies all across the world are using the Internet to transform the way they do business. Software-on-demand is essential for getting the competitive edge and offers benefits to customer and vendor alike. This is a true win-win for the EDA industry.

Sashi Obilisetty is founder and CEO of DualSoft LLC. Previously she was a consultant to EDA companies.