ALTR Company Profile

Altair Engineering Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise-class engineering software enabling innovation across the entire product lifecycle from concept design to in-service operation. Our vision is to transform product design and organizational decision making by applying simulation, optimization and high performance computing throughout product lifecycles.

Our simulation-driven approach to innovation is powered by our broad portfolio of high-fidelity and high-performance physics solvers. Our integrated suite of software optimizes design performance across multiple disciplines encompassing structures, motion, fluids, thermal management, electromagnetics, system modeling, and embedded systems, while also providing data analytics and true-to-life visualization and rendering.

We believe a critical component of our success has been our company culture, based on our core values of innovation, envisioning the future, communicating honestly and broadly, seeking technology and business firsts, and embracing diversity. This culture is important because it helps attract and retain top people, encourages innovation and teamwork, and enhances our focus on achieving Altair’s corporate objectives.

Our software enables customers to enhance product performance, compress development time, and reduce costs. Our thirty-year heritage is in solving some of the most challenging design problems faced by engineers and scientists. Altair is also a leading provider of high performance computing, or HPC, workflow tools which empower our customers to explore designs in ways not possible in traditional computing environments. We believe we are unique in the industry for the depth and breadth of our engineering application software offerings combined with our domain expertise and proprietary technology for harnessing HPC and cloud infrastructures.

Our primary users are highly educated and technical engineers, commonly referred to as simulation specialists. We predominantly reach customers with simulation specialists through Altair’s experienced, direct sales force, especially in industries requiring highly engineered products, such as automotive, aerospace, heavy machinery, rail and ship design. To enable concept engineering driven by simulation we make our physics solvers more accessible to designers, who may be less technical and not expert in simulation, by wrapping them in powerful, yet simple interfaces. We are increasing our use of indirect channels to more efficiently address a broader set of customers in consumer products, electronics, energy and other industries.

Altair pioneered a patented units-based subscription licensing model for software and other digital content. This units-based subscription licensing model allows flexible and shared access to all of our offerings, along with over 150 partner products. Our customers license a pool of units for their organizations giving individual users access to our entire portfolio of software applications as well as our growing portfolio of partner products. We believe our units-based subscription licensing model lowers barriers to adoption, creates broad engagement, encourages users to work within our ecosystem, and increases revenue. This, in turn, helps drive our recurring software license rate which has been on average approximately 88% over the past five years. Each year approximately 60% of new software revenue comes from expansion within existing customers.

Altair’s software products, available under our HyperWorks, solidThinking, Altair PBS, and Carriots suites, represent a comprehensive, open architecture computer-aided engineering, or CAE, simulation platform. We believe our products offer the industry’s broadest set of technologies to design and optimize high performance, efficient, and innovative products. Our products are categorized by:

Solvers & Optimization;

Modeling & Visualization;

Industrial & Concept Design;

Internet of Things; and

HPC.

Solvers & optimization

Solvers are mathematical software “engines” that use advanced computational algorithms to predict physical performance. Optimization leverages solvers to derive the most efficient solutions to meet desired complex multi-objective requirements.

Altair’s solvers are a comprehensive set of fast, scalable and reliable physics solvers that can solve complex problems in linear and non-linear mechanics, fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, motion, systems and manufacturing simulation.

Altair’s optimization technology is a key differentiator and spans our product offering. Our focus on optimization combined with multiphysics and multi-domain simulation has changed product development, and we believe customers using our technologies can gain a sustainable competitive advantage by developing better products in less time.

Modeling & visualization

Modeling & visualization tools allow for advanced physics attributes to be modeled and rendered on top of object geometry in high fidelity. These tools are becoming more design-centric and relevant earlier in the development process.

Industrial & concept design

Industrial & concept design tools that generate early concepts to address requirements for ergonomics, aesthetics, performance, and manufacturing feasibility. These tools are simulation-driven and, we believe, emerging as a market force eclipsing traditional computer-aided design, or CAD.

Internet of Things

Tools to develop new Internet of Things, or IoT, enabled products, including device and data management, system level and full three dimensional, or 3D, digital twin simulation, and exploration, predictive analysis, optimization, and visualization of in-service performance. We expect our tools for multidisciplinary simulation and development to become increasingly important for product design. Our software is used to design and optimize IoT devices and connectivity, and for modeling in-service product performance.

We believe Altair’s math and systems solutions are unique for their openness, usability, and ability to provide signal-based and physical modeling from “0D” to “3D” all within our units-based subscription licensing model. A truly simulation-driven design process means that simulation models support decision making in each stage of the product development process. To support this, models need to be multidisciplinary and may include mechanics, electrical and electronics, and software among other technical elements, and must encompass a scope of products ranging from components to IoT-enabled “systems of systems”. Varying degrees of fidelity aid the process where computational requirements or data availability might otherwise prove to be obstacles.

We believe a key strength to Altair’s math and systems solutions is allowing development organizations to move seamlessly in this multi-discipline, multi-component, multi-detail space while integrating models from various authoring tools. With a broad range of multi-physics solvers based on an open-system approach, a strong set of model reduction techniques can be employed toward IoT-enabled product development which can then be carried forward into device management and application development on the Carriots platform.

High-performance computing

HPC software applications designed to streamline the workflow management of compute-intensive tasks including solvers, optimization, modeling, visualization and analytics in fields such as Product Lifecycle Management, or PLM, weather modeling, bio-informatics and electronic design analysis.

Altair’s HPC offerings support engineers and scientists across a wide range of industries including automotive, aerospace, academia, energy, electronic design automation, defense, and weather. Altair PBS Works is our secure workload management suite to improve HPC performance and reliability in on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Our simulation technology users are moving to ever-larger models to achieve higher-fidelity results for more realistic simulations. As these models are computationally intensive, they require special equipment and cloud access for deeper design exploration and optimization. We believe HPC addresses the performance needs of our users and is critical to companies and research organizations working on complex, simulation-intensive design problems.

Altair Partner Alliance

The Altair Partner Alliance, or APA, provides access to a broad spectrum of complementary software products using customers’ existing HyperWorks Units. They can download and use partner product applications on-demand. This constantly growing portfolio extends their simulation and design capabilities to help create better products faster.

Software products in the APA include technologies ranging from computational fluid dynamics and fatigue to manufacturing process simulation and cost estimation, with applications specific to industry verticals including marine, motorcycles, aerospace, chemicals, and architecture. Altair plans to continue to add valuable third-party software solutions to the HyperWorks platform to empower innovation with comprehensive enterprise analytic tools.

Software related services

To ensure customer success and deepen our relationships with them, we engage with our customers to provide services related to our software including consulting, training, and implementation services, especially when applying optimization. We provide clients with technical services throughout their entire product development lifecycle including design, engineering, and development. Altair’s headquarters includes an industrial design studio, a prototype shop, and test facilities. We have expertise designing and working with controls, power electronics, traditional and composite structures, and total system level development in the automotive, aerospace, consumer products and other markets.

Implementation and custom software services are available to help customers leverage their investment in Altair’s software to streamline CAE workflows and solve specialized industry vertical engineering problems. We work closely with our clients to increase organizational efficiency and decision making by tailoring these solutions to a client’s own environment and processes.

We believe the unique combination of our broad industry domain knowledge and software expertise has enabled Altair to enhance and replace customers’ legacy applications, integrate our software applications with client business systems, develop clean-sheet designs or custom software solutions, and transform their product development processes.

Client Engineering Services

Altair provides Client Engineering Services, to support our customers with long-term ongoing product design and development expertise. This has the benefit of embedding us within customers, deepening our understanding of their processes, and allowing us to more quickly perceive trends in the overall market. Our presence at our customers’ sites helps us to better tailor our software products’ R&D and sales initiatives.

We operate our CES business by hiring engineers for placement at a customer site for specific customer-directed assignments. We employ and pay the engineers only for the duration of the placement.

We concentrate on placing simulation specialists, industrial designers, design engineers, materials experts, development and test engineers, manufacturing engineers and information technology specialists. As a leader in the simulation market, Altair attracts high caliber talent from around the world. CES is focused on placements that align strategically with customer usage of our software. We have a strong recruiting operation with over ten sourcing specialists who identify, attract, vet, and hire technical professionals for our in-house and customer needs. We maintain a candidate database of over 80,000 highly qualified engineers and designers. Our CES candidates and placed employees are valuable sources of talent acquisition for Altair’s other business segments.