Altair, buses and astronauts

Jun 7, 2012 | Hot Topics

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to spend a few days at the 2012 Americas edition of Altair’s HyperWorks Technology Conference. Over 800 people heard Altair; T.K. Mattingly of Apollo 13 and Apollo 16 fame and a NASA Space Shuttle pilot; Luca Pignacca, chief...

Acquisition mania

Sep 27, 2011 | Hot Topics

I’ve been working on a mid-year update of my market numbers for CAE (which show better than expected growth to date in 2011) and am stunned by the rapid pace of acquisitions we’ve seen this year. It’s one thing to note them as they happen, but when...

1 2 3 4 User conferences

Jul 6, 2011 | Hot Topics

If you’ve been following this blog over the last few months, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been traveling. A LOT. In all, I attended 4 user conferences and 3 other meetings in 5 weeks. Aside from the surreality of bouncing between Orlando, Las Vegas...

Altair’s building something big

Jul 1, 2011 | Hot Topics

Last week, I spent several days with Altair and its customers in Orlando — I’m not sure how, but I’ve managed to miss all previous HyperWorks user conferences and was excited to see what Altair is all about. I came away very impressed, both with the...

Altair expands into CFD

Jan 12, 2011 | Hot Topics

Altair Engineering yesterday announced the acquisition of ACUSIM Software, maker of the AcuSolve family of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) products. Altair develops and markets a broad set of CAE tools, including the RADIOSS solver and the HyperMesh suite of...

PTC, DS, Altair and Hexagon oh my

Oct 28, 2010 | Hot Topics

Lots going on today — PTC makes its big announcement (and, I think, slipped up a bit on some timing), DS reports that Q3 was really good, Altair acquires SimLab and Hexagon closes on Intergraph.  Briefly, before I flit off to the PTC event: •PTC’s been so loudly...

PLM vendors have some success helping displaced workers

Mar 25, 2010 | Hot Topics

Over the last year I’ve written a number of posts about vendors offering free or low-cost software and training to laid-off engineers and designers to help them better position themselves for the job market. How has that worked and how many people were actually...

Solvers and sunscreen

Mar 2, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the third in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. The last post discussed the fact that the cost for keeping a specific customer may be higher than expected and may even exceed the revenue...

CAE data management – the breakdowns

Jul 14, 2009 | Hot Topics

CAE data management has become a critical topic for many CAE departments — after all, tying together which CAD models were used as the basis for an analysis, the meshing technique and resulting mesh, the loads and constraints and the resulting data and...

Hits and Misses of 2008

Dec 31, 2008 | Hot Topics

It’s been quite a year — like most, filled with stuff both good and bad. My top 10 happenings, all related to engineering software:1. Hit: The CAE vendor landscape changed dramatically, as ANSYS bought Ansoft andexpanded its applications footprint even...