Altair’s chief engineer talks about the company’s PLM future.
Two weeks ago, Altair announced that it has acquired cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) company Cassini, an India-based developer targeting small-to-medium businesses.
Yeshwant Mummaneni, chief engineer of Cloud, Analytics & IoC at Altair, explained that the acquisition will complement Altair’s simulation, data analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technology.
“Over the last year we rolled out Altair One, which is our cloud innovation platform. In a sense, it’s a single portal into everything that Altair has to offer on demand,” said Mummaneni. “That platform is our digital thread platform, so to say, it provides a detailed visibility into the simulation value chain portion of the PLM lifecycle.”
“With Cassini,” he added, “The idea is to add connectivity both downstream, for CAD and design, and upstream, for the manufacturing and service sides of the fence. We want to roll that technology into Altair One and provide a digital thread which is very simulation centric but is open to the rest of digital thread that is weaved across the enterprise in the context of PLM.”
Altair One is positioned as both a cloud-based portal to various tools as well as a data backbone for the company’s users. However, many organizations in the design world still operate with desktop tools. Mummaneni explained that “Cassini will help to take care of the data from desktop and cloud beyond the simulation world. It will provide a more centralized governance with respect to the flow of data.”
He added that Altair has a good understanding of what he calls simulation lifecycle management. “For high fidelity simulation data management, we’re all set. We have interfaces into the CAD and manufacturing world for traceability. Cassini was 100 percent focused on the PLM side, from a CAD centric point of view. For instance, they have modules for Manufacturing, Engineering, Quality and for when products are in service, providing more connectivity to that ecosystem and a more seamless experience for engineers.”
Does This Mean Altair Hopes to Be a Heavy Hitter in the PLM Space?
With the acquisition of Cassini, Altair hopes to expand its capabilities up and downstream into the product lifecycle. On paper, this sounds like other engineering-centric PLM platforms, but does it mean Altair is looking to become a leader in that space?
“Our interest in Cassini is not to play in the PLM space, competing with traditional PDM vendors” Mummaneni asserted. In other words, they were not the big PLM players like Dassault Systèmes or Siemens Digital Industry Software.
Instead, Altair hopes that the addition of the Cassini team, like its founder and CEO Raghuram Reddy Tera, will help build out Altair’s digital fabric and extend the company’s expertise in PLM.
Mummaneni explained: “We need people that have been thinking about the digital thread aspect in the PLM space and this team has that. And they have built a system from a CAD-centric point of view. We want to take that experience and reimagine it from a simulation, digital twin and MBSE point of view. Altair [enables] customers to build 0D and 3D digital twins, including data driven AI/ML based twins. Our technology enables linking these digital twin assets. With this team we will be able to weave a much better thread story.”
For example, that thread might entwine simulation data within AI applications. Currently, Altair One allows users to manage simulation data and produce machine learning models. But integrating that data throughout the product lifecycle will need a more systems level data fabric, according to Mummaneni, and he believes the Cassini team has the experience to create that fabric.
As Altair founder and CEO James R. Scapa put it in the company’s press release: “Upon integration, customers will have a comprehensive view of digital thread activities in the simulation portion of the PLM value chain, creating a differentiated journey and value for design engineers, simulation engineers, production engineers, engineering data scientists, and IT/ HPC administrators.”
At this stage of the acquisition the goals for both Altair and Cassini appear to be first stage integration. However, it should be noted that as that integration begins to play out—and Altair further expands the tools available on Altair One—it’s conceivable that those tools will cover more aspects of a product lifecycle. The more Altair One can cover that lifecycle, the more tempting it will become to compare it to platforms like Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE or Siemens’ Xcelerator.
Either way, Mummaneni explains that whatever PLM tools an organization utilizes, the aim will be to have it compatible with future Altair and Cassini based tools. He said, “We’ve always had an open philosophy, even with competing toolsets. Cassini has the same policy and it’s going to be similar on the platform.”
How Cassini Boosts Altair’s AI and Platform Priorities
Recently, Altair has been making waves in the AI space, specifically with how AI technology can be beneficial to its traditional simulation, manufacturing and industry users. However, the company has also been using its AI technology to reach out to non-asset-centric users, like finance and retail.
But with the addition of Cassini’s PLM technology, much of the AI benefits may be felt by those asset-centric users that ask questions like, how do we:
- Augment product variation?
- Compliment existing physics-based simulations?
- Accelerate decision making based on the context of simulations?
- Track events through an IoT system to form predictive failure models?
“From a PLM perspective the areas of focus include in-service, manufacturing, CAD and simulation,” said Mummaneni. “Our IoT platform enables customers to provide bi-directional data to monitor asset performance. Edge-to-cloud IoT platforms covers the in-service portion of the PLM value chain as well. Altair’s IoT expertise, and its IoT platform, compliments the Cassini team and technology.”
As for when these benefits will come into play, there is no timeline yet. However, Mummaneni did point to how quickly the organization has implemented other tools onto Altair One. “Meanwhile,” he added, “existing users of Cassini technology will be able to access the tools using their existing SaaS stack. They don’t have to wait for it to go into Altair One.”
He stressed that once the integration is completed, the primary focus will be to further integrate the Altair One platform and its digital thread between its various applications. Mummaneni explained: “These apps produce a ton of data that need to interface with upstream and downstream applications. When that data is needed in connection to our simulation products, we want to provide a seamless experience for that. That’s part of what we’re aiming with Cassini.”
