Electronic product development is an industry that always has its sights focused firmly on the future. As consumers we demand that the electronic products we buy are more intelligent and feature-rich, and companies respond to this by releasing new and updated products with ever-increasing frequency. This puts great demands on electronics designers, who must constantly seek new and better ways to deal with the complexity of developing the next generation of products.
Because we supply the tools that these engineers rely on to get their job done, one of our key responsibilities is to look towards the future and anticipate the needs of the industry going forward. This has always been a key driving force for Altium since we started providing electronics design systems on desktop computers in the mid 1980's. Prior to this, CAD software for electronics designs was only available to those organizations that could afford the massive costs of UNIX workstation-based systems.
We followed this up with the first Microsoft Windows-based board design system in 1991, again allowing design engineers to harness an emerging technology. Over the years we have consistently demonstrated our desire and ability to help engineers navigate industry change that can be both evolutionary and, as new electronics technologies emerge, highly disruptive.
In the late 1990's we recognized that the emerging technology of low-cost, large scale programmable logic devices had the potential to bring about such a disruptive change. We set about building the resources within our company to create the next generation of design product that would allow engineers to embrace this change. This was no ordinary challenge. We realized that to harness the potential of this new design paradigm we would need to take all of the existing electronics design processes, both hardware and software, and integrate them with the emerging model of FPGA hardware design.
Our IPO in 1999 was a direct response to this challenge.
Unifying design
In May of this year we introduced Altium Designer, a single design application that represents our unified electronic product development system. This product encompasses all of the technology that we have developed, acquired and integrated over the last several years.
Although our existing Protel, Nexar and CircuitStudio products had already merged into one software system, it wasn't until the launch of Altium Designer that we had confidence in the completeness of our technology to present it as a single unified product.
Altium Designer is important because it is the only system available that unifies within a single application the design of the three main elements that make up an electronic product – the printed circuit board, the programmable devices on that board (FPGAs), and the embedded software that brings intelligence to the system. Unification of these disparate domains is the thing that will allow the mainstream of electronics engineers to implement entire, intelligent digital systems inside the latest generation of high-capacity, low-cost programmable devices.
This trend towards 'soft' design, building electronic systems on field-programmable devices, has the capability to redefine the way electronic products are developed, allowing more intelligent products to be designed in a shorter time. We believe that this way of doing design will be the 'next big thing' to hit the electronics industry. Altium Designer is the only system on the market that has been specifically created to fully support this 'soft' approach.
It has taken major capital investment and a massive effort over a number of years to build Altium Designer. Along the way our research and development team has grown into a truly world-class organization – an essential requirement to build such a significant product.
Our challenge now is to take our message to the market and capitalise on the technology leadership position we have created. To do this we must build a world-class sales and marketing organization that can match our product development capabilities and turn our technology into solid revenue growth over the next few years. We must now align the entire organization behind the task of putting Altium technology into the hands of every electronics engineer, designer and developer.
Nurturing success
Over the last few years we have focused on the strategic development of our next-generation design
technologies. Maintaining this focus has sometimes come at the expense of short-term financial performance. These decisions, tough though they have been at times, were made on the basis of giving us the best chance of achieving the long term goals which were the object of our IPO back in 1999.
As we enter this next stage of our organizational development, our strategic and tactical goals have become aligned. We must now focus on using our technology to help generate success for our customers.
This involves not only revamping our sales and customer service organizations, a process that is already well underway, but most importantly, extending the understanding of everyone within the company that our future is dependent on the success of our customers as they embrace our new technology and products.
Opening a door to the future
This past year has represented a turning point for Altium. We have successfully developed, packaged and branded our unified electronic development system in the form of Altium Designer, which addresses both the current and future needs of our customers. Our focus is now shifting to aggressively marketing and selling this system and the concepts that it embodies to the mainstream of electronics designers.
Many of our customers have already seen dramatic benefits from deploying our latest software throughout their organizations, and have been happy to participate in our new customer reference program. The results from these early Altium Designer 'evangelists' has produced some very positive and influential case studies that will add to the growing number of success stories on our web site and within our marketing materials.
The brochure – Are you ready for the future – accompanying this Investor Update was recently developed to support our marketing and sales initiatives. This year, we have chosen to share with you the message we are sending to the market together with a standard form Annual Report. This will give you the best feel for how we are engaging with our customers and the direction in which we are heading.
Our messaging has already begun to capture the imagination of our customers and the industry at large by highlighting the changes that are currently happening in electronics design, and demonstrating the potential Altium Designer has to open a door into the future for all electronic product developers.
Nick Martin
Founder and CEO
Altium Limited
