Since forming Altair 35 years ago, it has always been important for me to spend time meeting with our customers, staying close to and understanding their needs, challenges, and opportunities. Despite not being able to travel, this year has allowed me to connect with more customers (and potential customers) than ever before. And, as you may guess, business leaders around the world find themselves in uncharted territory due to COVID-19. The global pandemic has, in some ways, increased the urgency for digital transformation and the need for data-driven decisions at the speed of light. A lynch pin of this transformation is high-performance computing (HPC).

Propelled by HPC, the opportunity for simulation and increasingly, data analytics, to improve business outcomes is enormous. Through development and acquisition, Altair has been putting the pieces in place for our customers to leapfrog their competitors through HPC optimization for decades. Since acquiring Altair PBS Works workload management suite from NASA in 2003, we have continued to build and acquire the best and most powerful HPC technologies.

This year has been one of exceptional advancement and investment in terms of how we help customers manage their HPC resources, both on-premises and in the cloud. Just in the last several months we have acquired Univa and Ellexus, and released arguably the most significant update to Altair PBS® Professional® to date.

Altair and Univa's solutions optimize throughput and performance of applications, containers, and services to help hundreds of companies manage thousands of applications and run billions of tasks every day to obtain actionable insights and achieve faster time-to-results.

Customers have been telling us they have an increased need to manage storage more intelligently with storage-aware scheduling, which Ellexus provides. There is also huge potential for optimization by considering input/output (I/O) as part of workload management strategy. The Ellexus profiling solutions go beyond data collection. They give the customers the answers they need.

Customers from all industries see benefits from this technology, and Altair is continuing to expand industry-specific expertise. We see enormous potential for Altair’s further expansion into finance, life sciences, and oil and gas, as well as considerable expansion in the semiconductor space. The world’s largest chip manufacturers rely on Altair because we provide the fastest job scheduler in the industry and the most advanced design flow optimization and dependency mapping tools. Our acquisitions further expand the scope of our semiconductor design optimization offerings, connecting more dots and providing more acceleration opportunities along the path to bringing new chips to market.

Collectively, our 2020 advancements give customers the tools to support a broader spectrum of HPC workloads, empowering them to optimize their enterprise computing investments at every turn: improving ROI on everything from HPC infrastructure and engineering time to their spend on software licenses. Our investments in this space augment not only our technology but our team of technologists, further advancing the first-rate, commercial-grade experience Altair is known for providing to customers across the globe.

Although this year has been full of unexpected challenges, at Altair we continue to forge the path forward and deliver best-in-class technologies for our customers. 2020 has been an incredible year for our enterprise computing business, and demand for the optimization of HPC environments has only increased in light of recent global events.
These moves strengthen our position as the leading provider of HPC workload management and resource optimization technology. Across all verticals, we know customers need to reduce IT complexity, deliver smart and faster results, and save time and money. We are proud to have Altair be their single source for HPC, data analytics, and simulation solutions.