Sam Mahalingam and Jean-Claude Ercolanelli discuss the recent acquisition and how they’re working together to make simulation shine.
Altair is now part of Siemens, and as with any conjugation, it’ll take time to work out all the kinks. But the two tech companies (I mean, one tech company) are enjoying their honeymoon.
Earlier this month at Siemens’ Realize Live Americas 2025 user conference, Engineering.com sat down with a pair of execs for an inside look at the $10 billion acquisition.
Sam Mahalingam, CTO of Altair, and Jean-Claude Ercolanelli, senior vice president of simulation and test solutions at Siemens Digital Industries Software, revealed their thoughts on the transition, what it means for Siemens and Altair users, and how AI will play a big role in the combined simulation portfolio.
The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Engineering.com: How’s the acquisition going? Sam, what’s it like working for Siemens?
Sam Mahalingam: Fantastic, fantastic. It’s a bigger family that we [Altair] are coming into. Altair was almost one tenth the size of Siemens software.
Our culture fit is truly good. Our core values were envisioning the future, technology first, embracing diversity and open, honest communication. It was all about, how can we start expediting innovation?
That was the kind of culture that we had. And coming into a larger company like Siemens, initially, I was a little worried whether there would be a similar kind of a culture or not. But I was pleasantly surprised. I think the culture is very, very, very similar to what it was at Altair. This whole one tech vision that Siemens has, I think, nicely fits in. And at the same time, Siemens software has been a company that understands the world of engineering, and our genesis was also in the world of physics-based simulation. And so I think it is a perfect match in my opinion. And so far, it’s been great.
Engineering.com: And Jean-Claude—how do you like Altair?
Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: First of all, I second every word that Sam just said. I was pleasantly surprised to see the same cultural fit, the same drive for excellence for the customers. Solving customer problems, putting the customers at the center and bringing the powerful tech to actually solve and address problems.
But beside this, what I found is Siemens has been paying a lot of attention and taking care of the people. Our business is about the people that are creating these products and solutions, and Siemens recognizes that. And I’m sure that Altair was doing the same. And I think it’s maybe the common theme of the tech culture. There’s no tech without the people.
Jean-Claude Ercolanelli, senior vice president of simulation and test solutions at Siemens Digital Industries Software. (Image: Siemens.)
Sam Mahalingam: I always used to say CTO doesn’t mean chief technical officer or chief technology officer, it means chief talent officer. You need to identify the right talent and bring them into the organization. At the end of the day, it’s the people who make or break the company. And if you bring in the right people, the bright-eyed into the organization, you are automatically going to see a tremendous amount of innovation that’s going to come out of that organization, and absolute agility as well.
Engineering.com: What’s in store for Altair users? Are they going to notice any big changes, or is it just a matter of changing the name on the invoice?
Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: Right now it’s still Altair on the invoice. It’s Altair and Siemens, but after the merge of the legal entities, they will only get one invoice.
Sam Mahalingam: It’s a true integration that is being worked out. There will no longer be the Altair brand. It will just be Siemens.
Engineering.com: Do you have a timeline on that?
Sam Mahalingam: We have a plan in place, but I don’t want to share that. We are working through that right now.
Engineering.com: In terms of the software itself—Altair HyperWorks, for example—is that going to get a Siemens skin on top?
Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: Might be the opposite. Who knows? Here we want to give the best of both, and they have a proven user experience and workflow that they bring the user from the start to end of the analysis work. And you know, the colors may change—the colors will change—but it really is a true integration from the technology standpoint.
Sam Mahalingam: Yes, I think in terms of the user experience, both sides have put in a lot of effort to modernize the user experience for the engineering world. And so we’ll take the best of the both worlds and make sure that it reflects as part of the integrated offering that we provide. But our intent is to make sure that the products get integrated. I mean, it all takes time. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but as we go through the integration process, as we finish the integration process, it will be one portfolio of products from Siemens.
Engineering.com: Will it be part of Simcenter?
Sam Mahalingam: All the design and simulation tools will be part of the Simcenter portfolio, but the high performance computing and the data analytics and AI will not be part of Simcenter.
[Neither Ercolanelli nor Mahalingam would comment on what portfolio those tools would eventually join, though it may not exist yet; Siemens is actively expanding its center collection. For more, see What is Siemens Designcenter?]
Engineering.com: How is AI impacting simulation at Altair?
Sam Mahalingam: [Altair] started investing in engineering AI almost seven, eight years ago. It was an initial small investment in terms of figuring out how AI can truly add value to the whole simulation world.
Everybody was quick to jump into this whole notion of physics-infused neural nets. We also built something in that space. And then later on, we realized that it’s not just the data-based model that people are looking at. We need to also understand the geometry of the 3D model, along with the material, along with the constraints, your boundary conditions, and the load cases that you’re going to apply. This is extremely important as to how you want to capture these features for an AI model.
And that is where I think the ground-up development started, and PhysicsAI was that vision that we put in place. How do we capture the physics-based characteristics as features within the deep learning model which truly understands geometry as well? So I think that was a groundbreaking technology that we built.
Once we introduced PhysicsAI and we embedded that into our modeling visualization tools, we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of users within our customer base who started using PhysicsAI. And then at the end of 2023 we did a survey and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of use cases for which PhysicsAI was being used. And when we documented those use cases, after surveying our customers, we came to around 115 different use cases for which PhysicsAI was being leveraged. So that is how fast customers started picking it up, because we nicely embedded PhysicsAI right into the tools that they were using on a day-to-day basis.
Engineering.com: Do you have any other plans for using AI in simulation?
Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: Yeah, we’re actually using AI for accelerating solvers. We’re working on AI chat for the documentation. And having a virtual agent to help guide a user, like a virtual engineer, to do automated and repetitive tasks.
Sam Mahalingam: Deloitte, one of our global system integrator partners, actually created agentic AI, leveraging Altair RapidMiner, as a virtual engineer. You command it and it starts driving our products right from opening up a model, cleaning up the model, setting up the load cases, asking it to run the simulation, and then coming back and generating the report. It was a fantastic agent that they put together themselves leveraging all of our tools.
Engineering.com: What’s the most exciting thing on the horizon for Siemens and Altair?
Sam Mahalingam: I think the way we can provide a complete lifecycle intelligence solution with our Siemens Xcelerator-as-a-Service. That’s what excites me. Intelligence for all the different lifecycles: product lifecycle, manufacturing lifecycle, process lifecycle and business lifecycle.
Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: For me, it’s the ability to really deliver that comprehensive digital twin to our customers. That’s one thing, but also that digital thread. So the integration of both technologies into the entire product lifecycle, what Sam calls the intelligent lifecycle. So that’s two things that really excite me. We want to deliver solutions to our customers so they can fix the pains, the challenges.
Sam Mahalingam: We want to amplify innovation for our customers so that they achieve engineering brilliance.
Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: We actually can transform engineering together.
