Earlier this year I shared in a Fast Company article that internal disruption inside an organization is not always a negative experience. Rather, it’s a way to reinvigorate innovation and keep talent engaged within an organization. It’s been a strategy we’ve implemented at Altair since day one. I’ve found that experimenting and “shaking things up” creates greater opportunities for our employees, broadens their knowledge, and keeps the business and our customers growing.

Over the past year, our employees from all parts of the organization – from finance and legal to software development and sales – have embraced a shift to focusing on vertical industries, as well as cross-pollinating our data science expertise with our traditional simulation and design go-to-market teams. This convergence has created new growth opportunities for our customers by helping them apply digital twin technologies to improve their products, utilize compute power to scale faster, and deploy data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. 

We’ve also activated our development teams and challenged them to take our technology solutions to the next level, pushing the boundaries of what we know is possible by integrating our products in truly transformative ways. The convergence in our simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), and data analytics and AI technologies is coming to life like never before as we bring together “data science + rocket science.” 

I am proud to announce we will release the most important and powerful software updates to our entire solution set in the past 10 years. While you will hear more details in the coming months, I am particularly excited about the following updates to our platforms for the 2023 release:

Altair® HyperWorks®

The updates to Altair HyperWorks empower engineers with a comprehensive suite of design and simulation solutions that harness the power of computational science, HPC, and AI. Altair HyperWorks is the most powerful, versatile, user-friendly, and open computer-aided engineering (CAE) platform on the market and sets the benchmark with blazing-fast speeds, an open and programmable architecture, and AI-powered workflows. Its new, modern user experience and Python APIs throughout the platform empower developers and users to create unified, best-in-class solutions leveraging technology from the entire Altair HyperWorks portfolio.

Altair® RapidMiner®

The upgrades to Altair RapidMiner offer both domain experts and data scientists the ability to leverage synthetic and real-world data with an integrated, easy to learn and use, end-to-end data analytics and AI platform. Altair RapidMiner now delivers generative AI capabilities and deeper support for coding data scientists. The platform also offers users the most advanced automated toolset available, including decision trees, auto-clustering, auto-machine learning, auto-feature engineering, and auto-forecasting. Customers can build and use rich, real-time dashboards more intuitively than ever with a new, streamlined user interface and those with intellectual property in the SAS language will be able to write, test, and run SAS code directly from their Python development environment.

Furthermore, Altair RapidMiner with generative AI enables non-programmers to create large language models (LLMs) and refine models for new or proprietary use cases, all without needing to write code. Users will be able to access all 300,000+ Huggingface models with one click and fine-tune models with hundreds of millions of parameters, competing with some of the biggest models on the market. Generative AI in Altair RapidMiner also simplifies and accelerates workflow design. Users simply state the desired data transformations, and the platform will suggest and configure the appropriate workflow. 

Altair® HPCWorks™

Altair HPCWorks, our HPC and cloud platform, has undergone one of the biggest technology changes in decades. As the world leader in workload orchestration, we offer HPC solutions that account for resource, licensing, and data requirements of applications, all while aligning with an organization's business strategy. Through the adoption of web-scale distributed technologies, we give HPC centers around the world the scale and adaptability demanded by modern distributed workflows. Furthermore, we have improved our dynamic cloud scalability based on real-time demand by implementing a unified interface for monitoring cloud-deployed nodes. This ensures efficient cloud spending by enabling global cost controls and providing enhanced visibility from your preferred Altair workload manager. By targeting specific workloads with cloud resources, we ensure expenditure matches business needs.

Altair One™

Altair One, our cloud innovation platform, serves as a gateway and embraces convergence by giving users dynamic and collaborative access to all Altair technology solutions plus scalable HPC and cloud resources all in one place. Within Altair One, Altair Units can be used to instantaneously access HPC on the cloud without the need for any configuration. Our customers can also use Altair One to easily configure, build, and deconstruct their HPC infrastructure on-demand with any of the popular cloud providers, avoiding vendor lock-in and uncontrolled cost. Altair® Material Data Center™ and our Simulation Data Management are also built on the Altair One platform for consistency, traceability, and collaborative decision-making across the enterprise.  Altair One allows all our users to interact with Altair support, access our new enhanced AI-powered support documentation, and manage their software license and users.  

I believe the culmination of our organizational advancements, combined with the power of our technology portfolio will position us to finish 2023 strong and pave the way for an even more successful 2024. Every day, we work to tirelessly bring best-in-class technology and support to our customers around the globe.