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.
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