Altair acquires OmniQuest, maker of Genesis

Just across the newswire (here), Altair announced that it has acquired OmniQuest, a company you may know by its former name, Vanderplaats R&D, maker of the Genesis structural analysis and optimization solution.

Altair CEO Jim Scapa said in the announcement that “OmniQuest was founded by the late Professor Gary Vanderplaats, a giant in the field of structural optimization who developed many unique and powerful optimization algorithms used in the commercial market today. OmniQuest’s products are used by several major customers, and we are excited to make them available to all our customers going forward. The acquisition of this excellent technology and team will further enhance Altair’s optimization leadership in the market driving lightweight and structurally efficient designs across the globe.”

The release highlights Genesis’ long presence in the automotive vertical, especially in composite design. The release is actually lovely, as far as these things go, highlighting Dr. Vanderplaat’s contributions to simulation: “OmniQuest founder, Professor Vanderplaats, was a founding father of practical structural and multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). His contributions to vision, theory, and practical applications of MDO and structural optimization are significant and his early contributions include the modified method of feasible directions algorithm, which became very popular in the structural optimization field by his own code CONMIN (constrained minimization). This code is embedded in many programs and remains among the best in the world today. In the late 1980’s he left behind a legendary academic career as a tenured professor at UC Santa Barbara to found Vanderplaats Research & Development (later renamed OmniQuest) and served as chief executive officer and chairman until his passing.”

The important bits: it’s a done deal, and many of the OmniQuest/VRAND/VR & D team have joined Altait. No financial details were disclosed.