Altair, Siemens and Maya HTT: a dream simulation partnership

For over four decades, Maya HTT has been a Siemens partner, authoring more than 30 products in the simulation portfolio and helping customers to get the most value from all the Siemens solutions they use. With the recent acquisition of Altair, this successful partnership is about to enter a new era with an even broader range of products that take advantage of the latest technological developments.

This comes at a time when businesses across industries are faced with the challenge of working more efficiently to create better products faster. They are looking to simulation to help them shift left and save money on prototyping and testing. But to do this, they need to make their simulation tools easier to use and accessible to a wider range of engineers.

Maya HTT has a unique Sell, Service, and Build model that makes it far more than just a reseller. As well as supporting customers in adopting simulation technology, it also uses the products to develop custom solutions and applications.

We spoke to Nicolas Parise and Danial Mazhar to find out how the Altair acquisition will benefit the long-standing partnership between Maya HTT and Siemens, and in turn how this will help customers better integrate simulation into their development lifecycles.

The excitement of AI and new ideas

The Simcenter portfolio is already incredibly broad, encompassing hundreds of different products that fulfill different engineering needs. But there is always room for improvement and both Danial and Nicolas are particularly excited by the AI expertise that Altair has.

“The integration of the AI toolset is the real golden nugget for me,” says Nicolas. “Just like when Siemens acquired CD-adapco to increase its competitiveness in CFD, this acquisition will make Siemens incredibly competitive in the integration of AI. This will help customers understand how best to use AI to increase efficiency and product quality, and to make simulation tools easier to use.”

“Siemens already had arguably the deepest and widest simulation portfolio,” says Danial. “Now this is expanded even further with Altair’s tools and experience. The AI capabilities are particularly exciting but also the acquisition should help the culture within Siemens to evolve. It brings new people with new ideas, new ways of working and solving problems. That’s really exciting for me.”

A big win for customers

Danial is confident customers are just as excited about the Altair acquisition as Maya HTT themselves. “They see this as two great teams with great products coming together to make something even better,” he says. “They’re keen to understand how they can benefit from the combination of resources and improve their business workflows and drive efficiency.”

With the recent explosion in AI tools, most companies are still in the process of understanding exactly what this new technology means for them and how they can get the most from it. When it comes to simulation, some are further ahead than others.

“Industries like aerospace have been early adopters of simulation because of the practicality and cost involved in testing products that are going into space,” says Nicolas. “But for new adopters like industrial machinery the value isn’t so obvious. They’re not sure if they can afford the specialist engineers needed to use the tools. Altair brings well-recognized tools like Simsolid and Inspire that make simulation accessible to designers and generalist engineers which is huge for driving this adoption.”

“Our customers want faster, more integrated simulation workflows,” says Danial. “They want to be more proactive rather than reactive and make it easier to pass information between teams so that they can get better answers to problems sooner. There’s no doubt that AI will help in the democratization of simulation. But it’s vital to have validation and verification in place. Customers want products they can trust, so the Siemens and Altair stamp of approval is really important to them.”

New opportunities

Ultimately, customers are looking for a partner that has both technical expertise and domain knowledge that can help them customize and integrate all the different solutions. They want to get the best return on investment and to scale, upgrade, and future-proof themselves. The Altair acquisition will reinforce Maya HTT’s capabilities in implementation, deployment, and ongoing support and training, putting the company in an even stronger position for winning new business.

“There will be a lot of scenarios where a customer was previously happy using a competitor’s products,” says Nicolas. “But with the Siemens and Altair portfolios combined, this will be more than a match for anything else out there. It will make it much easier for us to show that we have a better overall solution.”

“Altair’s electromagnetic suite is really exciting for us in delivering new capabilities that potential customers want,” says Danial. “The data science platform Rapidminer will also help us win new customers. Its ability to handle bigger data or real-time applications opens up new possibilities for solving complex problems.”