Simulation is a little bit like religion. It is largely a matter of trust, and few solutions on the simulation & analysis (S&A) market are as trusted as those from ANSYS. This nearly 50-year-old company is the clear business leader in the important sub-PLM sector of S&A with revenues well over $1 billion. And prospects look good: once you have started to trust a system, the outlook is that you will keep it, or at least solutions from the same developer.
This is one of the reasons why ANSYS's future growth potential looks good. But there's more: simulation has become “the star of PLM” over the last several years, according to analyst CIMdata, and ANSYS has the competence, resources, customers and market position required to match the needs that follow in the path of disruptive technology development in recent years.
ANSYS general manager Mark Hindsbo agrees, pointing at, among other things, the company's recent innovative Discovery Live solution: “Simulation is one of the most critical technologies in this era of digital twins, threads, IoT and additive manufacturing,” Hindsbo says, adding that, “With Discovery Live, we’ve had a real breakthrough in computational speed. The algorithms and the graphics processing units that we use speed up simulation by a factor of a thousand.”
But as impressive as that is, it’s not enough. “We also need to make simulation easy to set up and we’ve done that by taking the fifty years of experience that we have and ‘pouring’ it into the software, so that the software makes the set up decisions. Then, we made it interactive so that the engineers could ‘play’ with their designs, change them, and get answers back again.”
His point is that when simulation becomes a matter of seconds to ask questions and making a mistake is only the cost of a click of the “undo” button, you really see behavior change. It almost sounds too good to be true. So, is the Discovery Live software what the market needs to reach new levels of democratization in terms of S&A? What about the costs for the computational process that is needed? Can simulation process and data management help to democratize S&A? How do digital twins affect simulation needs? Why are digital threads important in this context? Why did PTC decide to integrate this solution into its Creo software? What about ANSYS versus competitors like Siemens PLM and Dassault Systèmes?
These are some of the questions and topics addressed in today’s video report, with Mark Hindsbo as the main character. He definitely knows what he is talking about: he has a background with big league players like Microsoft and Boston Consulting Group and joined ANSYS in 2015. Today this Danish academic, a Master of Science, is ANSYS vice president and general manager of the Design and Platform Business Unit.
Meet him in in today's PLM TV News report, where you also will hear more from:
• Ajei Gopal, ANSYS president and chief executive officer
• Steve Dirtien, PTC managing director, Office of the CTO for CAD & PLM
• Marc Halpern, Gartner vice president and analyst
• Peter Bilello, CIMdata president and analyst