An Interview with Martin Harris, chief executive officer EMEA, Altium Europe, on the challenges facing electronics designers, today's economic challenges, the biggest changes within Altium, and the acquisition of web tool developer Morfik...
Q: What do you see as the main challenges facing electronics designers in getting their job done?
I think this answer can be split into two parts - the challenges electronics designers are facing in the projects on their desks today, and the challenges of the future. The big issue many users report concerns the complexity of managing their design data. Knowing that components are available or obsolete, knowing the cost options, knowing which items are in stock rather than hoping, or worse, finding out too late, remains a recurring concern. And this extends to the challenges of the future, which leads engineers firmly towards a connected world: How will they design with that cloud connectivity included? Answering these questions by designers is in turn the biggest challenge for companies like Altium. If we can't do that for them, we will have failed.
Q: How did the business model change in 2009 affect Altium and how are you facing today's economic challenges?
I think the changes we made to our business model, which mainly centred on price and subscription options, were easy ones to make. Our philosophy has always been to make our solutions as affordable as we can. There's little point, it seems to me, to create good technology that no-one can afford to buy! So reducing the price of Altium Designer made good business sense, and the benefits of the decision became clear when the number of new companies switching to Altium Designer increased. In the last financial year we recorded more than 1100 companies in Europe switching from other tools to Altium Designer - and this trend is ongoing. Looking ahead again, we're all agreed that a connected future beckons, with billions of devices sharing data in ways we've yet to see, across devices yet to be designed and embedded into machines of all sorts. It will be electronics designers who obviously create those billions of devices, and they will need tools that help them do so quickly and with some degree of certainty in the design process itself. So our strategy is to continue to make our solutions as affordable, as accessible and as easy to use as possible.
Q: What are your activities in the UK market?
We sell through our partner Premier EDA in the UK with a very good link into the local electronics industry. An interesting initiative from Premier is its support of a new prototyping lab for start ups in the SiliconSouthWest Labs at the Innovation Centre in Bath. In partnership with Premier we're providing Altium Designer licences and two of our NanoBoard 3000 fixed-FPGA development boards. As Premier's managing director Phil Mayo has said, it's a seed programme, so that companies or entrepreneurs can use Altium's solutions at the Innovation Centre, test their designs and our software, and then move ahead very quickly with Premier's support.
Q: What's the biggest change within Altium in the last 6 months?
It's been an extraordinary start of the year for Altium! The release of Altium Designer 10 and AltiumLive, our ecosystem for professional electronics designers, was a huge investment and a big step for us that took us through to the beginning of March. There was considerable demand pent up in the market and with users for the new release, and we were very aware of that demand as we moved past our self-imposed deadline of the end of January. The continued development of AltiumLive through February was essential, though, to the success of the overall release. Now we can deliver continuous updates to our content and to the software itself, and we've done a number of these already through March. We have moved away from major updates every six months to continuous updates every two-three weeks. Designers cannot afford to wait for new technology, and as I've already said, we fail them as a vendor if we don't help them stay on top of these developments.
I was in our Sydney HQ in early April as we announced another major change - our plan to move our HQ operations, our R&D team and our support operations from Sydney to Shanghai! In the face of some interesting comments from the market, we're taking this bold step to tap the opportunities we see emanating from China over the next, say, ten years! As a much smaller company, we did this in the early 1990s, moving from Australia to the United States, and then back again. So it's not a new concept for Altium!
Q: We hear a lot about Data Management from Altium. Do you want to play a role in PLM?
Good question. We're not in the "PLM for electronics design" business because we think that's a slightly inaccurate description of where the real challenge is. With the new vault technology that is part of Altium Designer 10 and AltiumLive, we can now give electronics designers certainty of design data management. That means that electronics designers can now update their colleagues elsewhere in the product lifecycle arena with the data about what's inside the "black box". With our cloud connectivity and our own AltiumLive ecosystem, we will develop and bring to market connections between Altium Designer and the conventional PLM space in the future, in a way that closes the circle on managing the lifecycle of a product across every design domain, without killing the innovation that has to remain at the centre of the electronics design part. That's been the problem in the past: You either had total control and killed the innovation; or great innovation and total lifecycle management chaos!
Q: Why did Altium acquire web tool developer Morfik?
Our acquisition of Morfik plays into AltiumLive and our move to China. Morfik technology allows for the rapid development of web-based applications in a way that is dynamic rather than static. Having the Morfik team meant we accelerated the development of AltiumLive. The move to China sees that acceleration increase, with the combined Altium-Morfik R&D operation set to become the core for the next phase of our development plans around creating device-based ecosystems.