Altair and Airbus Group sign worldwide multi-year software agreement

Altair announced today it has reached an agreement with the Airbus Group that provides designers and engineers of its Airbus, Airbus Helicopters, and Airbus Defence & Space divisions, as well as of any other company to which the Airbus Group holds more than 50% of voting rights, access to Altair's entire software portfolio, including the HyperWorks® CAE suite for its modeling, visualization, optimization and solver solutions.

The new agreement follows a prior Airbus strategic software decision for OptiStruct®, Altair's structural analysis and optimization solution. Airbus has successfully applied OptiStruct on many programs to optimize the weight and performance of its aircraft structures, such as the A350 XWB program, for many years. Terms of the agreement provide every Airbus engineers very flexible access to Altair's HyperWorks computer-aided-engineering (CAE), PBS Works high-performance computing (HPC), and solidThinking® design software solutions to support the development of lighter, high-performance aircraft structures.

“The Airbus decision marks an important milestone for HyperWorks as one of the preferred platforms to support simulation driven-design processes and structural lightweighting in the aerospace industry,” said Robert Yancey, Altair's senior vice president of global aerospace. “We are delighted to continue our close and successful collaboration with the Airbus Group with this enhanced multi-year agreement. Through this high-level engagement, we look forward to enhancing our technology roadmaps and services offerings to support the diverse needs of Airbus, its suppliers and the industry as a whole to streamline the development of tomorrow's exciting aircraft designs.”

In addition, the agreement complements and tightly aligns with a long term consulting collaboration between Airbus and Altair ProductDesign (APD). APD is Altair's global consulting services division, offering engineering expertise and development know-how for the aerospace and many other industries. Among other projects, APD assisted in pioneering Europe's first Optimization Center at Airbus, an innovative Altair consulting business model that delivers strategic execution of optimization technology on-location with program teams to achieve weight objectives. Today Altair has Optimization Centers deployed in over 20 aircraft and automotive OEM's from around the world.