India is among the top three markets for Altair: MD-India

With India emerging as one of the fastest growing and most attractive markets for Information Technology, the American multinational in computational science and intelligence has identified the country as one of its top three markets globally. Talking to DH’s Lavpreet Kaur, the company’s Managing Director - India, Vishwanath Rao, explained Altair’s bullish view of India’s burgeoning electronics market, AI and data science and how the $572.2 million company proposes to capitalise on it.

Edited excerpts.

Take me through Altair's operations in India and the global market. 

Altair started off in 1985 as a consulting services company for the large automotive OEMs. We soon started developing some software tools and later commercialised and productised them. The first product was around finite element modelling. We slowly morphed from a services company to a software company, and today 85-90% of our revenue comes from software and maybe about 10 to 15% of our revenue comes from services. We initially started with mechanical simulation and eventually started our high-performance computing business in early 2000s. Over the last 8-10 years, we made a significant amount of investments in data science and machine learning and that was the third business line that we started off. 

We have about 3500 employees worldwide and about 700 are in India, with a very large development team working here on many of these technologies. We also have about 1,000 customers in India and 15,000 worldwide and work with various industry verticals including automotive, aerospace, consumer durables, construction mining equipment and many others. 

How big is the Indian market for Altair?

India is a very significant market. In fact, it happens to be among the top three markets for Altair worldwide and we contribute a significant percentage of our worldwide revenues from India in terms of servicing global customers. 

How much have you invested in India as a company so far?

We've been investing here for the last 25 years. Right now in Bangalore, we have two large facilities - one on the outer ring road we have roughly 300 employees and a fairly large office in the city centre with another 250 employees. We've invested significantly in building up our computational capacity here in India as well as doing a lot of POCs (Proof of concept) and customer benchmark projects. We also have a very large data centre out here for executing these projects. Apart from that, we continue to hire and increase the team size in India. There are some areas where a lot of the work happens out of India, where the ownership of the product is in India, especially on our enterprise computing products. 

Can you take us through some of your clientele in India and what are the areas of services? 

If you look at the automotive industry, you can name any company and they will be our customers. In fact, pretty much every automobile company anywhere in the world would be our customer. The same is the case with almost every aerospace company, whether it is Airbus, Boeing including Indian defence manufacturers like HAL are all our customers. On the consumer appliances front, companies like LG, and Whirlpool and on the banking side HDFC Bank is a very large install base for Altair. Reliance, Tata are other names. 

What are Altair’s future plans in India? 

The plan is to expand our customer base and that’s the biggest expansion plan that we have. We see the nature of the product constantly evolving and changing and there are no pure-play mechanical products anymore, everything is integrated with its electronics. So our focus going forward will be on addressing the electronics market. The other big focus area for us is AI and data science - infusing AI into all of our simulation technologies and all the products that we develop. We are hiring a lot of people in both these areas.

We are setting up a new office in Chennai right now which can accommodate about 150 people. That office should be operational probably from November. And then there are plans to expand our presence in other regions like in Hyderabad.