Earlier this week, Altair announced its new One Total Twin platform, a repositioning of the company’s digital twin offerings. The Michigan-based simulation software company says it is offering a new way to use digital twins while pulling in the various tools and apps that it already offers to Altair customers, including simulation software, Internet of Things tools, and data analytics.
What Is the Innovation Here?
The big questions from this announcement are what the new digital twin platform can do for engineers, and also where Altair is innovating. One Total Twin does not include any new technology, but instead represents a repackaging of existing Altair services. We asked Altair a few questions about the goals behind this new one-stop digital twin service.
“As organizations pursue digital transformation strategies, some seek the built-in expertise of turnkey platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, while others want the flexibility of highly customizable offerings that adapt to their existing ecosystems,” said Altair Global Director of Product Management Keshav Sundaresh.
The benefit to digital twin customers now, Sundaresh says, is that Altair already has high-performance computing clusters, a strong artificial intelligence and machine learning sector, and one of the largest simulation suites in the industry. Users can take all of these pre-existing services and use them on premises or pay-as-they-go using cloud services.
Altair expects customers to use the new platform in all phases of product and process design and development. In the pre-production phase, engineers can use digital twins to understand how a component’s requirements might match up against the environment. Post-production, digital twins can shift from the designer’s view of what-might-be to the manufacturing engineer’s view of what-is. After production starts, the digital twins will reflect all of the changes made during the product validation process, informing engineers about potential trouble or serving as a proving ground for proposed innovations or cost-saving measures. Once a product moves into service, digital twins help engineers determine the system’s remaining useful life cycles. Knowing when to pull a part out of service before failure will help companies keep production flowing.
The One Total Twin rebranding might not be a leap forward in technology, but it lets Altair highlight its digital twin solutions at a very promising time.