Emma Lo Russo, president, Altium

CS: Firstly, how has the market changed since the beginning of the recession and how has Altium addressed the challenges? ELR: What we've done at Altium is aggressively regard the recession as an opportunity! To do otherwise almost inevitably leads to despair, and that's not Altium's style at all! Taking this stance means not shying away from a healthy dose of quick reflection and self analysis, and some quick action. So while Altium completed our first half year (which ended 31st December 2008) back in profit, with sales and revenue growth, and paying an interim dividend to our shareholders, it was also clear that our customers would be affected by the recession. So we decided to change our business model. And we have set out a new manifesto, as it were, for electronics designers around the world, based on helping them remove barriers to innovation, helping them create next generation electronic designs, and helping them not fall into the traps that recessions can sometimes conceal. We've essentially served notice on the electronics design sector by asking every designer, worldwide, one simple, searching question: what makes you so special? Because in a world in which innovation leadership is shifting, in which new economies are setting the new economic benchmarks, the traditional product differentiators of price, position and product are no longer real differentiators. To help every electronics designer at least consider this question, and then answer it in a meaningful way, we've announced a way forward for those seeking to harness the greater opportunities in this new world. We've permanently reduced the price of our solutions, removing a key barrier that may have stopped electronics designers accessing everything they need to take their design concepts to market ahead of the new competitors that continue to emerge. We're helping them plug into a continuous stream of new devices, technologies and developments that keep them at the forefront of their industry. We believe this holistic approach to electronics design, with the user's experience firmly at the centre of the design process, is the breakthrough organisations need. And we believe this will serve as a low risk path to Altium's unified design solution, allowing more electronics designers to pioneer the new wave of connected, intelligent, next generation electronic products. CS: What traditional design limitations can Altium Designer resolve? ELR: Traditionally, electronics design is a sequential process where electronics designers use a series of disconnected point tools. This approach, which we acknowledge once worked reasonably well (albeit somewhat expensively), dramatically restricts the designer in his task of creating something that breaks through the competitive clutter. This sequential process sees electronics designers encumbered with various interfaces, a myriad of design files and numerous design methodologies. Without a single view of the electronics design process, electronics designers are not able to break free from the design limitations of yesteryear. So we like to think that we're helping designers discard the now outdated design rule book. Altium helps by replacing this piecemeal approach with a new way of designing. Altium's next generation electronics design solution is unified, meaning that it works off a single data model and provides a single view of the entire design process. Designing with a unified system means electronics designers can move across the hard, soft and programmable design domains. It also means that changes made in one domain are reflected within the rest of the design in real time. This process frees electronics designers to innovate because the design process is now reversed. The functional intelligence, coupled with the best interests of the end user, is now at the centre of the design process, courtesy of Altium's higher abstraction approach to programmable design. And because designers are freed from having to make an initial choice about the hardware, they can explore ideas, experiment with devices and develop rapid prototypes, all without constraint. CS: Altium has announced that plenty of opportunities remain in China - can you elaborate on this? ELR: China is emerging as a real powerhouse in the electronics design industry. And there is growing evidence to show that this change may come sooner than expected. Many commentators continue to see China as a manufacturing mecca, but the tag 'made in China' is set to change to 'designed in China'. These commentators, who continue to ignore China's vision and commitment to making this a reality, are doing so at their peril. When analysing the data, it is easy to see that there are rapid increases in patents, university graduates and technology exports in China. There are also major Government investments being made in the name of innovation. For example, China has shown the highest growth on R&D expenditure, and the fourth highest overall in the years 2000-2005, and as recently as March, the Chinese Government announced a US$66 billion stimulus package for the electronics design sector alone. These investments combined indicate that China is not slowing down. These figures are just the beginning. Every day, more research indicates that China is rising up the innovation ranks. For example, only this month the Economist Intelligence Unit announced that China has moved up from 59th to 54th in the Global Innovation Rankings. Many predicted that this would take China five years to accomplish, but it only took two. It just goes to show that China's potential is nothing short of unbelievable. China is producing more engineers, more designs, more innovation and more competition than ever before. For Altium, this represents a huge opportunity that is augmented by the estimated 250-300,000 unlicensed users of our older solutions, whom we are now migrating with our Invest in Innovation programme. This unmatched growth and confidence raises some interesting questions for European organisations: what are you doing to prepare for the post recession climate? Where will tomorrow's competitors be based? CS: What enhancements have been made to v3.2 of Altium's TASKING TriCore VX-toolset? ELR: Altium's TASKING TricCore VX-toolset has been enhanced with new features linked to Infineon's 32bit TriCore microcontrollers. This includes support of the latest variants TC1167 and TC1197 for the industrial market and the TC1767 and TC1797 for the automotive market. In addition to this, further code generation improvements in both speed and size, an update of Eclipse IDE to Ganymede release CDT 5.0 and support for the Audio Futures family of devices has been included. For further information on this update you can visit our website. CS: How important do you feel seminars and exhibitions are compared with resources available on the Internet? ELR: Seminars and exhibitions have their place. They bring to light industry trends, build user communities and provide great opportunities for vendors to exhibit their technology. But, particularly in the current climate, there always seems to be another way to build communities, interact with peers, converse with users. For example, Altium has used our website to develop a world class support centre and community for engineers. Our web based resource centre offers instructional videos and PDFs that demonstrate step by step how engineers can enhance their Altium Designer experience. These videos have proved to be invaluable to customers new to Altium Designer. And Altium has a very active user forum where Altium employees and users from all over the world contribute. It's one of the most valued support services Altium offers, and is based on an open and collaborative approach by both Altium and its users.