Altair celebrates 25 years of growth

BANGALORE, INDIA: Privately held company, Altair Engineering is celebrating its 25 years of establishment. Altair has developed a brand in the commercial GRID computing space besides their traditional computer-aided engineering (CAE) space.

Speaking to Akanksha Prasad of CIOL, Pavan Kumar, managing director - South Asia at Altair Engineering, talked about the company and the roadmap ahead.

Could you share a few things about Altair, especially the India operations?

Altair as an organization started around 1985. We started like every other company looking at low-cost development. With more than 1,400 employees, it has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

If we have to categorize our business, then one area would be the software line, second is product design, third is the Business Intelligence (BI) and fourth is the enterprise computing (spin off of CAE).

Having said that, from the go-to-market point of view, our biggest business is CAE and I believe that we are at the leadership position in the country. The adjunct areas are the enterprise and IT, which helps us penetrate further into our engineering domain. We are also in traditional BI space.

In India, we currently have around 500 customers. Our team here in India looks at all the four operations. This is the product-based perspective in the country. We also operate in the services space and have substantial amount of business coming from this area.

Altair is a 25-year-old privately held company. Over these years, the company's revenues moved to $152 million. Why are the revenues so low, and do you plan to go public any sooner?

Couple of good reasons, one we are not in the traditional computer-aided design (CAD) space, the design, which is more volume oriented. We are in the simulation, wherein we test the design, whether it would work or not. For unique 100 CAD designers, there would be the requirement of 4-5 people to use simulation at a time. So the space that we are in is more technical and specialized.

We believe in maintaining strong bottom line and technology base and the value that we add in the market. Another factor is that Altair is a focused company that does look at growth, but not by acquiring other company only for growth. We have examples in front of us, where a majority of companies got acquired or merged with time.

We are in the growth phase and see it happening over a period of time. Similarly, going public would happen sometime, but it is not a focus at the moment.

As you mentioned, Altair has largely been into CAE and simulation space. Do you have plans to expand the portfolio and get into the volume-based CAD space?

We do want to expand portfolio and enter into market, but with a difference. One of the areas where we forayed into with our acquisition is industrial design. We bought solidThinking that helped in enriching the portfolio.

solidThinking develops and markets industrial design/styling software. Designers use solidThinking software to create photo realistic 3D virtual prototypes of products across the design arena, from architecture and automobiles to electronic devices, jewelry, product packaging and yachts.

As we do mission-critical business for almost all of our customers, CAD being more retail-kind-of business, is not the right direction to focus at.

HiQube is in your fold now. Could you share something about it?

HiQube is a BI software solution. The core technology behind this new database management system originated in Italy. We acquired it in 2007.

HiQube combines three data management methodologies - Hierarchical, Relational and Multidimensional - within a single, unified database architecture. We are working on next version of HiQube, we have a team working on it already. The development team is 140 people strong, HiQube is part of it.

A lot of our customers are also using HiQube in reporting. Simulation is done on computer, but you have to test it live and differentiate it with other scenarios and do an analysis.

How do you manage to find the right talent for such niche technology?

There is lack of talent in this space. But we are working towards it. We have tied up with a lot of leading universities for the course. Apart from the availability of the course, another big lacuna is the trained faculty. There is a low acceptance level. We partnered with a few faculty members. We have a professor from IIT D, who do not work for us full-time but train the faculty.

We also have our project book (recipe book) for various domains, about 24 project, which students can take up for more understanding and better learning.

The third part of what we do with the education industry is providing hands-on work to the student. We came up with that unique idea of setting up a center of excellence on the college premises. NIT Hamirpur (near Delhi) for example is one of the centers for us.

Similarly, we have some 19 centers of excellence, including at Bangalore, Coimbatore and many more. This helps the student get exposed to technology well, go help them get hands on real-time projects. The second phase of this initiative would be partnering and appointing a franchisee.