Rafiq Somani: Engineering Simulations Made Easy

Rafiq Somani, Country Manager – India, Asean & ANZ, ANSYS

With a global presence in over 75 strategic sales locations and a stupendous presence in over 40 countries, ANSYS helps global companies across industries solve their most complex design challenges, and launch innovative and cost-effective products, says Rafiq Somani, Country Manager – India, Asean & ANZ, ANSYS, in an interaction with Arpit Gupta of Elets News Network (ENN).

How engineering simulation software solutions benefit various industrial sectors, along with IoT solutions provided by ANSYS?

Engineering simulation is used in many industries such as Aerospace, Oil & Gas, and Automotive to reduce costs and improve time to market by predicting how product designs are likely to perform in real world conditions. As a leading provider of engineering simulation solutions, ANSYS helps global companies across industries solve their most complex design challenges, and launch innovative products cost effectively. Our comprehensive solutions leverage High-Performance Computing (HPC) technology to enable customers to carry out larger, more detailed, and more accurate simulations using multiprocessor computers.

By combining scalability, superior multi-physics foundation, and dynamic architecture, our offerings deliver efficiency, drive innovation, and reduce physical constraints. This helps our customers develop next-generation products such as aircrafts, space vehicles, electric vehicles, complex electronics, and cutting edge technologies including unmanned systems. In addition, physics-based simulation combined with big data analytics, industrial devices, and embedded intelligence, enables our customers to reduce risks and unplanned downtime while accelerating new product development.

How has ANSYS changed the portfolio of technologies it offers to the customers in order to adapt to the IT landscape that is shifting dramatically?

We focus on superior customer engagement by driving innovation, and enabling businesses to create robust and reliable products. Irrespective of the size of their business, many of our customers today are moving towards cloud computing, IoT, and Big Data. Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and that the number will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. A survey by Right Scale, a cloud vendor, reveals that hybrid cloud adoption has increased significantly – up from 58 to 71 per cent. Given these trends, we have launched a subscription-based pricing model for our simulation software in order to optimize licenses, and enhance flexibility and value for our customers.

ANSYS Elastic Licensing is the first engineering simulation software that provides hourly-based access to the breadth of ANSYS’ world-class multiphysics platform in a single license. Elastic licenses offer multiple benefits- they promote flexibility across the full portfolio of simulation products, allowing adjustments for peak usage. They are also beneficial for ad-hoc development teams focused on short-term projects. Using this model, companies like ARM are able to accelerate designing of smarter and faster chips for electronic devices. Recently, we also signed an agreement to collaborate with GE Power Engineering to pilot “simulation as a service”.

These agreements bear testimony to our goal of helping our clients adopt emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) by providing them with a diverse array of choices across licensing and deployment.

“Our comprehensive solutions leverage High Performance Computing (HPC) technology to enable customers to carry out larger, more detailed, and more accurate simulations using multiprocessor computers”

How is ANSYS participating in the digital initiatives of the Government of India?

We are currently involved with a number of digital initiatives launched by the Government of India. We strongly believe that innovation is a key ingredient for these initiatives to truly succeed–this includes innovation in terms of processes, practices, technology, equipment and materials.

Make in India: Manufacturing businesses can drive innovation and maintain their competitive edge only by compressing their product design cycles and bringing products faster to market. Given costs associated with time and resources, it is imperative to adopt virtual product development and prototyping or ‘Simulation-Driven Product Development’. The automotive sector is witnessing new product variations in as little as 20 days, while the aerospace and Defence sectors are seeing increasing product complexity and shorter delivery times. This is also true of several other industries. We are quite excited about the “Make in India” initiative and the possibilities that it has opened up for us. We are looking forward to partnering with companies through this initiative and helping them lower development time and costs, reduce time to market, optimize product performance and help them outperform competition using simulation tools from ANSYS.

EXPANSION PLAN ANSYS
currently has six offices across India, a global presence in more than 75 strategic sales locations, and a network of channel partners across more than 40 countries. Over the last few years, the company has made significant acquisitions, and added several partners as well as sales and support staff. It will continue to invest to better serve their customers and help them augment their product lineup.

Skill India: While India graduates 1.5 million engineers every year, only a very small percentage of them are employable, making training an urgent imperative. Skill India is a critical initiative from the government that will play a pivotal role in creating structures and mechanisms to nurture youngsters, and empower training institutions. We have developed a number of creative approaches to train the next generation of engineers through project sponsorships, student competitions, and hands-on programmes such as our own Authorised Training Center (ATC). Skill training is an important element of ANSYS culture as R&D is extremely important for all our products. We have centers in Pune, Noida and Bangalore and our R&D operations in India are the second largest for the company, outside the US.

Startup India, Stand up India: This initiative aims to boost employment generation and wealth creation. As a part of this initiative, we have established academic partnerships with IITs as well as reputed universities and engineering colleges throughout India. We are closely involved with IIT Chennai’s Incubation Cell-IITMIC, and Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), IIT Mumbai’s Incubation Centre. We offer sponsorships for engineering academic projects and also are key sponsors for SAE BAJA and SAE SUPRA competitions.

How do you view India as a market for ANSYS as an end-to-end engineering and technology solutions provider?

India is a fast growing, critical market for ANSYS. We have a good presence in several industries in India including Automotive, Aerospace & Defense, Oil & Gas, Energy, Electronics, and Education. Demand for simulation is growing rapidly within Asia. Asia revenues contribute just under 30 per cent to the overall revenue of the company, out of which India contributes its part. We serve our customers through our sales offices located across the country and constantly endeavor to give our customers 360-degree solutions that bring people, products and processes together. Engineering simulation helps companies beat the competition and bring out products faster in the competitive market. By the end of the decade, it is estimated that every engineer will use simulation as part of his daily routine.

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