What is Altair 365? Why is it a big deal? Altair 365 is offered by Altair, which has simulation, design, and several product development solutions for smart connected products.

Altair 365: Moving Solutions to the Cloud

What’s the deal here? Altair has several different products including HyperWorks, Knowledge Works, Altair Embed, and Altair Activate. They are taking those products and moving them into a cloud-based solution that will be available through a browser. It continues a trend that we’re seeing with a lot of different solution providers where they’re making this transition from desktop-based, on-premise-based types of solutions to cloud-based solutions.

Applying Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

In that way, it’s not all that unusual or different. It’s a good move. However, there are some interesting implications here. They introduced this idea at their technology conference a few weeks ago of applying machine learning and artificial intelligence on top of simulation results. You can learn more about that in this video.

In this case, it’s interesting because they have a solution that will capture sensor data in an IOT platform kind of way. They also can capture test data and store it. All three of these can be stored in the cloud. It is part of this vision. When you think about it, there’s a continuum from theoretical performance with simulation and analysis to test data and then real physical performance data streaming onto an IOT platform from a remote product. There’s this continuity from design and theoretical all the way through reality and what is actually happening in operation.

Machine learning and AI can be applied across all of them to give you more insight. It can happen in the cloud. They’re talking about supporting this kind of scenario in the cloud, which becomes very interesting because you have remote compute resources, you can have AI machine learning applied more generally to it and use those compute resources across this continuum. It is one of the things that stood out to me.

Seamless Transition Between Solutions

People can transition from tools like solidThinking, which is the design, solidThinking Inspire, which is the aesthetics and generative design, HyperWorks, more of the specialized, higher-end analysis types of tools, and other tools. These tools are moving toward a standardized UI.  It will help democratize the use of these tools across many more users.

It’s interesting because standardization of UI, alongside their licensing structure, which is basically credits that can be used across the different tools. It doesn’t matter which tool. Users can switch back and forth between these tools seamlessly and not have to worry about, “Do we have a license of that?”

All of these tools are going to be available. It’s just, “Which ones do you want to use your credits for in use?” Not only can users seamlessly transition between these tools from a UI perspective, but also from a licensing perspective, they have a lot more freedom.

They just announced this a few weeks ago. There’s going to be a time of transition. They will not be taking away the on-premise or desktop solution. If you’re a user, you’re still going to be able to run your products in the same sort of way. However, from a licensing perspective, I don’t think it matters if you’re on-premise, on desktop, or in the cloud. It’s a matter of almost UI preference. Do you want to run in a browser? Do you want expandable compute resources? The argument switching there is actually pretty interesting. It’s a little bit more seamless than some of the other software and solution providers that are trying to make that switch right now.