Record Attendance at 2009 European HyperWorks Technology Conference

Notable trends throughout all industries remain saving resources and accelerating innovation. Saving resources was illustrated by process automation examples cutting development time by up to 90%, by optimization examples saving 650,000 tons of material annually, and by software harmonization examples reducing licenses costs by 40%. Accelerating innovation was the unifyied response to the challenges of the current economic crisis. Keynote speakers from CNH, Eurocopter, Porsche and PSA emphasized that virtual methods are a central part of their innovation strategy and core to their business success.

It was a pleasure to be a keynote presenter at this year's European HTC, said Gennaro Monacelli, Director Design Analysis and Simulation, AG & CE Competence Centre, CNH Italia S.p.A.. Not only was it impressive to present to such an experienced and big engineering audience, it was also a pleasure to listen to a diversity of good papers presented during the conference. Additionally the networking and experience exchange on development strategies and virtual product development methods with fellow engineers and managers was very good. The European HTC surely is a conference to recommend to every engineer in product development and an event I am looking forward to visiting again.

“We are very pleased with the outcome of this year’s European HTC,” said Dr. Michael Hoffmann, Vice President European Operations, Altair Engineering. “The growth of 25% in attendees over 2008 demonstrates that the HyperWorks value propositions of saving resources and accelerating innovation resonate particularly well during these challenging times. Our attendees appreciated that Altair continues to deliver innovations like breakthrough time savings in crash simulations and novel CAE enterprise solutions.”

Also the technical showcase with 30 exhibits, including eight booths of HWEC (HyperWorks Enabled Community) program participants was very well received by all attendees and offered opportunity to network and keep up-to-date about Altair’s partner offerings in software and hardware.

I was very pleased with the level of energy and excitement at the EHTC, says Dr. Farzin Shakib, CEO of ACUSIM Software, Inc. We met a number of high caliper potential ACUSIM users who are interested in both our basic fluids only as well as complex Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) solutions. ACUSIM's FSI solutions are considered the best-in-class solutions for solving coupled fluid flow and structural phenomena and have been adopted by multiple top structure code manufacturers.

Within the accompanying technical showcase of the conference we had a dedicated partner village for our HyperWorks Enabled Partners, of which 8 participated in the 2009 European HTC. All of our partners and exhibitors reported a very good level of interest and interaction from the European customer base, said Michael Humphrey, VP Partner Program at Altair. Customers are still excited about our continuously growing HyperWorks Enabled Partner Program. It continuous to increase the value of existing investments in HyperWorks Units and provides the flexibility to run partner products at no additional costs.

The EHTC was sponsored by SUN, HP, Bull Fluidon, Metacomp, solid Thinking, nCode, Software Cradle, Magna Powertrain, exhibitors were: Tass, ACUSIM IBM, Microsoft, EMSS, ForceFive, e-Xstream, Cluster Mechatronics, PEC, VDC, NAFEMS, DYNAmore, and Intes. Porsche presented the new Panamera, the Racing Team of the Technical University of Freiberg and the Tuning Akademie Aachen exhibited their race cars, the University of Arts in Bremen showed their ornament design created with OptiStruct and the DKI (Deutsches Kunststoff-Institut) showed the mountain bike they developed jointly with Rotwild.