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Altair, more than the sum of its parts

Altair, more than the sum of its parts

Oct 20, 2019 | Hot Topics

Quick: What do you think of when I say Altair?

HyperMesh? OptiStruct? SolidThinking? Datawatch? Tokens/subscriptions/Units? Yeah – me, too. But I learned at Altair’s global Technology Conference last week that it’s much, much more than that. Yes, the company buys a lot of individual brands and users are free to use just that brand, but Altair’s magic is in combining the best of each to create greater wholes. Let me explain:

Altair has made over 20 acquisitions since 2010. All have been strategic (meaning, not for the revenue or specific customers alone) and added something new to theAltair portfolio. CEO Jim Scapa and his team are carefully building a technology set that will make Altair an analytical powerhouse that stretches well beyond physics.

Physics is, of course, Altair’s lifeblood and a lot of cool things are happening on that front. Mr. Scapa and CTO, Design and Simulation Solutions James Dagg, introduced two biggies:

  • HyperWorks X, a unified user interface in which users will be able to do everything from concept design to detailed system simulation. Meshing, morphing, simulating and managing the simulations and results will be done from within a single UI, allowing users to move between applications without leaving the model. Eventually, Mr. Dagg said, users won’t distinguish between different Altair products, they’ll just move from task to task. But, and this is where the magic comes in, users will also be able to use AI (artificial intelligence) to speed up model prep and inform runs, saving time and resources.
  • Altair 365 will enable users to run their applications in the cloud, whether physics or data science, and provision scalable cloud resources on demand. Oracle was a sponsor of the Altair event, so they were most mentioned as a cloud service partner, but Altair also works with Google CloudPlatform, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Altair’s spin is a rapid scaling algorithm that, in one example, creates a rendering farm of 350 cloud machines to execute a job in 4 hours, for under $100. In a more traditional setup, that hardware would be worth $1 million.

While that’s in the works, Altair is spiffing up the products it gained in its recent Datawatch acquisition. If you recall, Datawatch allows users to model and extract data from structured and other sources, such as PDFs, and then use that data in analytics, to draw conclusions. One upgrade is that Altair is switching those users that want to, to Altair’s Units scheme. Datawatch buyers were traditionally perpetual or subscriptions; by switching to Units, these users gain flexibility to shift between Datawatch (now Altair Knowledge Works) products — and, in time, to partner products, too. Altair Knowledge Works customers include banks and other financial institutions, and Altair believes the Units will enable it to rapidly expand in those new markets.

But let’s not overlook SimSolid. Altair acquired this in 2018 for just over $20 million, aiming to capture both the technology and the buzz around it. SimSolid uses patented (and other secret) tech to enable accurate and fast simulation on complex CAD assemblies. Right now, SimSolid can do static, dynamic and thermal analyses of structural systems. It uses fully featured (ie. not simplified) solid geometry models in the analysis — but no mesh. You can read what the company is willing to say about the tech inside SimSolid here, but a quick summary is that it’s based on external approximations, an extension to the Finite Element Method. The most-heard question about SimSolid is about accuracy: can it be both fast and accurate? The answer, according to customers who spoke at ATC, is an emphatic “yes”, with SimSolid coming in within 5% of test results. (More on that, here, from Altair.) Altair is betting that SimSolid, a CAD-neutral tool, will let it reach more designers who want to do simulation and need to do it quickly, in a way that fits into their timelines and workflows. There’s palpable excitement around SimSolid, from both Altarians (as Mr. Scapa calls his colleagues) and customers.

I could keep going –there are enhancements to just about all of the solvers in the portfolio, more coming for HyperMesh and the other supporting players– but you can read about that from Altair directly. My bottom line is this: The world isn’t a single-physics problem, so we need a range of solvers to help us understand it. We don’t all have a 3D model to analyze, yet still need to make decisions, so tools that span from 0D/1D to 3D are essential.. Not all firms have analysts; there is a place for designer-calibrated simulation tools in this market. And we need to stop reinventing the wheel, and let our vast legacy of simulation results help inform the next generation of whatever we bring to market, so letting AI help us is working smart by any definition.

Polliwog, announced at the ATC, is Altair’s 28th acquisition. Add that EDA capability to the company’s flexible Units licensing, a boatload of solvers, pre- and post-processing tools, cloud, new UI, AI, tools for designers and experts … it’s both innovative and practical, drawing users to new ways of working while honoring their long-established practices.


Note: Altair graciously covered some of the expenses associated with my participation in the event but did not in any way influence the content of this post. The title image is of Altair CEO Jim Scapa during his keynote.

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