Can you describe briefly your main line of business?

Altium is the market leader in unified electronics design. Our products let electronic engineers, designers, developers, and their organisations take maximum advantage of emerging design technologies to bring smarter products to market faster and easier. Altium's unified design environment means users can harness the potential of the latest electronics technologies, and move to a soft design methodology without the need to acquire specialist programmable device expertise. This provides companies with increased design flexibility, reduced production costs and quickens time to market. It also protects the intellectual property within their designs. Founded in 1985, Altium has headquarters in Sydney, Australia, sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets.

What is your best selling product and where do you ship it most?

Altium Designer. Its unified architecture removes the barriers imposed by disparate design flows, and unifies the design of the hardware, the programmable hardware and the embedded software. Altium Designer also delivers the freedom to move between any device, from any vendor, at any time. New features in the forthcoming upgrade include real-time, three-dimensional rendering of board designs, a new way of establishing connectivity and reducing schematic complexity, powerful new ways to generate FPGA hardware from C code, and a new way to create soft processor-based systems.
Complementing Altium Designer is Altium's NanoBoard, the industry's first development board based on FPGAs independent of those vendors. The NanoBoard takes full advantage of Altium Designer's unified electronic product development system and transforms engineers' desktops into a complete and interactive electronics product development laboratory. It features interchangeable peripheral boards, target programmable devices are housed on plug-in FPGA daughter boards, and engineers can easily change the target project architecture.

What's your roadmap from here?

Our strategic direction remains unchanged: to provide unified electronics design tools for use by every electronics designer. Our product R&D will see us continue to introduce new features at the rate of over two every business day, that take electronics designers to the future of electronics design, and that protect their legacy designs while opening up new ways of doing electronics design for the future. It's a future that has recently seen NASA's Johnson Space Centre standardize on Altium Designer for its future electronics design projects linked to the various manned and unmanned programmes managed out of the Centre.

How do you differentiate from your competitors?

As noted earlier, Altium leads the market in unified electronics design tools, that goes beyond an integration model by refusing to treat the process of design as being a sequence of disparate and isolated processes. Unified design provides a single design process for all aspects of development; a single coherent model of the design; and a single coherent model of the components used. Altium Designer provides a single design application with a single user interface, and a single design data storage model.

Any strategic move planned for the future?

Altium continues to base all of our product R&D on developing unified design tools for use by every type of electronics designer. That strategic position underpins everything we do.

What would make your life easier in this business?

One of our major challenges is the division of development teams into hardware and software teams. While this is very limiting for many organisations, there is hardly anyone with the authority or competence to try to change this divide.
It seems that everyone is happy with the silos as they stand, while missing out on the performance increases of a potentially unified design process.
Ideally, companies would see the urgency of raising the level of abstraction as hardware and software are coming together and would set up teams to understand the need for changes in their own development processes, similar to what happened when the Internet emerged.