During, 2014 ANSYS Convergence Pune I had an opportunity to have discussion with Rafiq Somani (Country Sales Manager – ANSYS) nice to see him in a same role but with the CAE vendor, before he was working with PTC as a Country Sales Manager till Oct 2013. Great meeting David Street (Asia Director of Marketing and Business Development for ANSYS) after one year and good to talk to Harshad Karve (ANSYS Technical Director Asia) and Kaustubh Nande (Marketing Manager ANSYS). Here is the interview.
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| Rafiq Somani (Country Sales Manager – ANSYS) |
What Ansys adds up in last one year?
David Street: Acquisition of SpaceClaim few days back was the most important thing that has happened, we now have CAD tool in our product lineup. Fundamentally, we have not changed. We have not changed our strategy for years, not changed our direction at all. We believe in same thing.
We are trying to make sure that our fundamental technologies to do the depth of simulation make sure that all of those individual technologies communicate each other to do Multi-physics. So, we made an acquisition which strengthens our depth. In Dec, 2013 we acquired ‘Reaction Design’ leader in simulation of complex chemical reactions, for example. Combustion, inline cylinder calculations in automobile, catalytic convertors. In past, we were able to do fluid flow, thermal simulation but lack in chemical reactions so ‘Reaction Design’ acquisition was important step to explore our offerings in this space.
We acquired SpaceClaim last week. One of our aim in simulation is to be able to do simulation much early in design process and if you do your simulation very early in the design process there comes a point where CAD model does not exist that means the simulation is done on the preliminary design. The question is
How would you do simulation before design is created? Before CAD model is build?
Need some capabilities to be able to create geometries before the CAD model is made. I think that’s what SpaceClaim brings to us, the ability to do simulation right from the concept stage. The SpaceClaim is history free tool and supports various file formats and neutral file types. It is also very easy to learn and use compared to traditional parametric CAD packages. Also for simulation software users with limited exposure to CAD, direct modelers offer an easy way to refine, edit, perfect, and add or remove features without learning a professional CAD program.
Some people are asking whether we are becoming a CAD company.
No, that is not our intension. We are not going to become a CAD Company. We have excellent partnerships with other CAD Companies, but we do recognized that there is some area where we need better CAD capability in concept design and SpaceClaim offers some excellent CAD Conversion tools to read CAD geometries from various packages. We also had long relationship with the SpaceClaim, worked as a re-seller for last 4 years, so acquisition is just a natural extension.
We released Ansys v15, added geometry import, cleanup and meshing capabilities. Important step forward was its ability to transfer data from one solver to another solver. So you can do multiple physics easily, we concentrated on making the process easy to work with multi physics. Other thing, we made lots of improvements in meshing technology. There are still many companies using legacy CAD meshing tools. After investigating our Workbench, those companies came back and said Workbench is much advance, have better tools and have now adapted Workbench meshing.
This is very fast changing busy market and customer continually make demands with us since when we were a small company and simulation was used at the edges of the design, but now the simulation has become such an important component of the business the guys at the higher level of the companies come and make demands, senior managers are much more concern about the simulation. Our engagement with the users is much higher now than it was in the past. Now, customers from India are not asking for the accuracy in the simulation results but want to know how to adapt simulation to unable engineers to re-engineer product development.
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| Rafiq Somani, Sachin Nalawade & David Street |
How SpaceClaim would be offered, will it be offered as a separate CAD package or an integrated product with other Ansys tools?
David Street: We already sold SpaceClaim for years, we are not going to change the way we were offering it. We would maintain relationship with SpaceClaim channel partners, that’s important asset that SpaceClaim have. Over a time some of the SpaceClaim’s technology would be integrated with the Workbench. But, won’t see any major changes!
The customers now are very much aware about the simulation. Now, with SDPD (Simulation driven product development) customers are looking for faster ways and realistically adapt simulation more and more and actually Harshad is driving that mission here.
Harshad Karve: What we have found in last 10 years simulation have somewhat moved from design. Design have timeline, lot of constrains, rules to follow. In last decade the simulation has become easy and more affordable tool, with better hardware available now. There is much tighter integration between simulation and design. We understand the customer’s process, building that on the top of our product and offering it to designers who may not be knowing much about the simulation. But, the designers would be able to use it because the organizational process is entirely followed and it’s very easy to use entire set-up. There are lots of designers now using simulation tools.
Rafiq Somani: I think best way is, you can do some Google search, you can find companies like Cummins are continually doing their research, use lots of simulation, publish papers and in their annual report their CEO speaks about the importance of simulation in the product development. I think the way companies were using simulation have changed. The ANSYS is the only single-vendor tool with the technical breadth and depth that meets every challenge our customers faced.
After doing the Google search as suggested by Rafiq, it was amazing to see hundreds of articles where companies use Ansys Simulation tools in their R&D work.
Links for your reference – http://www.cavendishcfd.com/pdf/AA-V5-I1-Cleaner-Green-Engine-Design.pdf
David Street: This morning, during presentation in conference we talked about one example of European company where they use simulation tools for the product development, the do not have resources with masters’ degree or PhD’s to do simulation job but with their two design engineers they are able to do the simulation safely, reliably. The company makes hearing aids. They use customized capabilities within Ansys, which allows their engineers who are not experts to reliably do simulation and now 75% of their simulation is done by non-experts. It’s quite impressive!
Why the simulations tools offered by CAD Vendors takes less time to do simulation compared to tools offered by CAE Vendors?
Rafiq Somani: As I am from CAD background, I would answer to this. It’s like Ansys going and saying we have SpaceClaim and its better CAD modeling tool then others.
I think when it comes to making meshing critical products, you want to make sure your product doesn’t fail; you want to make it right the first time, especially in nuclear power, defense, automotive and health care products. Even today you can see in automotive most of the times a failure occurs and they have to recall entire batch of thousands of vehicles. It costs millions and millions of dollars, affects brand credibility. So, when company wants to make sure that CAE results have to match field results they need better CAE tools like those offered by Ansys.
The CAD Vendors have some basic CAE but all depends on the customer whether he wants low cost, quick tools with less accuracy or looking for more reliable results.
I can quote lot of examples of customers. They are not ready to spent 10 Lacs on the CAD tools and ready to spend 1 Cr for CAE Tools. I have seen the amazing stuff customers are doing using our CAE tools.
Another example, one of major manufacturer of Airplanes from US is using our solutions for past 10 years and they have not yet found any error using Ansys products meanwhile they have found big problems working with the CAD packages that made news few days back.
Secondly, as you are aware about the CAD, CAE industry. Today, each and every product you see car or a health care products. It’s not just a single physics, there is structure, air flow, fluid, heat, electrical, software, magnetic and wireless applications. The parties have to do Multi-physics. There are many CAD, CAE Companies which can do little bit of simulation mostly with single physics. If you do one physics and transfer data to heat or flow analysis there will be at least 20% error in the test results. So, if someone has to do analysis of Multi-physics and get the right product, only Ansys can do it.
Every day we talk to our team and customers. I am happy to see the amount of value which Ansys gives is tremendous in terms of results and world class products developed. The ease of using simulation tools from ANSYS has helped to transform our customers from traditional physical tests, prototype culture to an analysis and virtual testing.
David Street: The companies which brought analysis software from CAD vendors would at some point realize that their products are not that smart. Using a proper tool helps to manage the way the product behaves. Every small product has to deal with the Multi-physics.
Rafiq Somani: We have this vision of Multi-physics for many years; you can pick up any CAE vendor they are specialized in some particular physics. Forget about the CAD vendors they can only do 20% of what Ansys can do. Again I have come from CAD background, everybody say its automatic meshing. It’s all visuals on screen. See it is very easy for Ansys to create such screen shots.
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| Rafiq Somani and David Street |
How is Ansys doing for last two years in economic downtime in India?
Rafiq Somani: It’s very good question, I have been meeting many customers like Kirloskar brothers. They find it difficult because of lot of big scams in power, oil and gas, irrigation and mining sector in last 5 year. Lot of companies is facing business challenges.
Rafiq Somani: Here is an interesting point, if you are a customer and you have the business problems and revenue is not up to mark and market conditions are not well, what is the first thing you will do?
I will try to re-design product, make it better!
Rafiq Somani: Yes better product, add some value engineering, save cost, and find new market and more. So, people in such situation. They try new ways, optimize product, and get ready for the future projects. Take example of Bharat Forge, as the automotive market was down their business turn around. But, after shifting to Simulation driven product development with Ansys, now they are winning in tough automotive market because now they are going back to customers and saying ‘this is our crankshaft ,we can design same crankshaft with better reliability, strength, 20 – 25% less weight, at less price compared to Chinese counterparts and deliver it on time with better quality’.
They are now winning orders from automotive MNCs in such a tough time; and thus further strengthen their position in the forging industry.
It is not possible with the traditional tools to get that information. Also, instead of wasting 10 Cr in physical testing it is always better to invest 1 Cr in tools and perform virtual testing.
Does simulation play any role in 3D printing, in mass production done using 3D Printing?
Rafiq Somani: 3D printing is very happening technology now-a-days every organization is getting 3D printing technology. There are lots of our customers using this technology. Customers print their prototypes to do testing, Ansys play important role in virtual testing of their models before it is printed.
David Street: 3D Printing mostly use polymer material, the company may want to check whether the product they made would work or not. The choice for the material is very huge, so to select better material, simulation is more valuable there.
Many global CAE players have entered India in last couple of years, so what are your strategies to compete them? And do you have any restrictions working with Govt. organizations like DRDO, ISRO, BARC?
Rafiq Somani: There are lots of niche players in market. They may offer quick solvers or meshing. But, if you want to do CAE casually with single physics there are ‘n’ number of solutions. If you want to do some serious CAE involving Multi-physics, and you want to be damn sure that product is right at first, there is no option to Ansys!
Now, look at the every product washing machine, TV, Computers, mobiles and even cars. There involves Multi-physics. Every physics have different type of effect on other physics. Products are getting more and more complicated people are looking better products, features at lesser cost. Getting 8-10 standalone products would cause 20-30% data loss due to lack of some physics involved and it may not support various geometry imports.
I would say if customer awareness is not there, not aware about of solutions like us, may go for the standalone companies and CAD vendors. But as soon as they interact with Ansys they say ‘Ohh my god you have everything together and are so reliable’
Our way of working with the customer is different, we just do not offer them solution, we have discussion with them, talk about how we can solve their problems. No other company provides such a value. We have 200+ support engineers working from Hingewadi, Pune office. Also have consulting team working for defence and global customers.
Harshad Karve: There were some restrictions in the past. But for last two years we do not have any restrictions working with any Government organization in India.
Do you have any customer using cloud solution?
Harshad Karve: Globally, yes. Not in India yet. We are talking to lot of companies. Most of them do not want to go on cloud. They want to build own private cloud.
David Street: We are working on how we can bring cloud solutions to Asia market, the trend we see happening is, the companies use to bring hardware technology to desktop, and then the next big thing happened, the companies’ then set-up a data center within the company, now the next and natural extension is Cloud.
Now, they want to move the hardware outside the company and manage several computers. It can be private cloud. We have solutions for every need. In North America and Europe, no customer has licenses in-house, every now and then they might have to do a big job, might be short of resources. When they need some extra help so that company buys more Ansys licenses and want them to use on cloud, so the software belongs to the company but the license can be used by others working with them. That is becoming more common now. Our intension is to bring that trend in Asia. We are working with well known hardware companies to have right technology, infrastructure to host Ansys products.
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| Harshad Karve (ANSYS Technical Director Asia) |
How is Ansys doing with the construction/infrastructure industry in India?
Harshad Karve: Lot of projects like bridges, infrastructure projects, stadiums Ansys is being used in structural analysis also consultants are also using it for HVAC projects.
Any message to dailycadcam.com readers and design professionals in India?
Rafiq Somani: It is great opportunity for country like India, Indian engineers are known as global engineers, but all the manufacturing is going to China. They are far ahead as far as mass manufacturing is concern. But, when it comes to custom design, different design India is still doing well in this field.
I am trying to tell engineers that if they can pick up our 10 best practices globally and try to apply two best practices in their company. Try to innovate, add value which can save the cost, time and produce better quality products.
Also, we are trying to do lots of marketing programs at student level so that they come up with innovative thinking much early.
David Street: You see, products are getting more and more complex. If you are innovative and smart engineer you don’t necessarily need entire infrastructure to realize your product concept because you can do it with simulation. Before you bring your product to market you need testing and so on. What it means idea doesn’t die if you are an engineer and have an idea, explore it and develop that idea using computer tools.
Rafiq Somani: The other message that I would like to share through my experience with customers is that, every customer I met they say “today’s engineers are very good in technology usage, very good in using software.” But, I think their value would tremendously increase, CAD has become commodity you know, and there are thousands of CAD engineers available. But, as soon as the engineer, same engineer understands the physics, structures, electronics better and then they have the knowledge of the tool I think it will give better direction to their career. I see any CAD engineer who can take up this role of CAE and analysis can expect 2X, 3X jump in salaries. There is big demand supply gap in the market. We are working on the challenges of demand supply gap in India. We are also working on starting Ansys Authorized training centers in India soon to overcome this challenge.
Thanks Rafiq Somani, David Street, Harshad Karve and Kaustubh Nande for your time for the discussion. Hope reader find it interesting to read this article. If you have any question please write on the mail id given below and we will be glad to answer.
regards,
Sachin Nalawade
Editor – DailyCADCAM
sachin@dailycadcam.com
Editor – DailyCADCAM
sachin@dailycadcam.com
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