No great revealing article this week on how to use an obscure ANSYS Mechanical APDL element to model the behavior of fluid flow in plant stems.  No hints on getting images from Workbench that will appease a project engineer so that he will give you one more week to get the dang model to converge.  No description of some great new capability that you can’t live without. 

This week we just want to take a few minutes of your time to thank each and every one of you who reads PADT’s The Focus for a fantastic year in 2011, to wish those of you with a winter-solstice-positioned-holiday a very happy whatever-that-holiday-is, and to pass along our hopes that 2012 will be a better year than 2011.

Those of us who are involved in sales, support and services built around ANSYS, Inc’s products have had a great year.  Release 13 has been a very important release that has allowed many of our customers to do their jobs faster and with greater accuracy.  We hope that Santa will reward the busy little ANSYS developers around the world, they deserve it.

During the year PADT has seen good growth both in new customers who purchase their ANSYS, Inc. tools through us as well as companies that have come to PADT asking us to do simulation or training for them  We have made some new friends along the way and have enjoyed working with those of you who we have known for a while.

There are 2,334 people who have actually signed up to receive e-mails about The Focus, and a quick look at our Google Analytics data shows that over 83,856 unique page views to www.www.padtinc.com/blog.  

If we dig a bit deeper into that data we find some interesting things:

• The most visited article was the Pretty Plotting article.   Making nice plots does matter!
• Second was an older article: 10 Things Every Mechanical APLD User Should Know!  That make us old MAPDL users very happy to see. 
• Third was the article on Mapped Face Meshing.  That one kind of stumped us because it is kind of an obscure power user thing… so I guess that says you are mostly power users, which is cool.
• If we look at what pages people linger at… we find that the longest view was when someone searched on “Self Penetration” and they looked at that result page for 29 minutes. There are a lot of ways we can go with that one… I’ll just let you guys take it as you want to.
• 47% of the page views came from Europe, 38% North America, and 11% from Asia.  This international reach is something that we are very proud of.

Looking Forward

2012 is shaping up to be a great year.  R14 is out and we are using it, and liking it.  We also expect 14.5 to come out in 2012 so we will have even more new features to use and blog about.  Also, look for PADT to announce a new simulation product that we are going to start selling in 2012 that compliments the ANSYS, Inc. product line and opens up new markets for our sales, services and training .

The biggest change you should notice in 2012 is a new PADT website.  I know, you all love the ramshackle hodge-podge of pages we have now. (Side note: in a meeting with a potential new customer the current www.PADTINC.com home page was described as being like that one house in the neighborhood where the owner does not trim the weeds, there is an old car out front, a few refrigerators, and a front porch that is falling down.)  This new site should be easier to navigate and much easier on the eyes, but full of the same rich content you have come to know and love.  We will be moving The Focus to a WordPress blog engine (giving up on windows based stuff) and expanding the blog to cover a lot more of what PADT does.  (don’t worry, you can just subscribe to The Focus and avoid articles about Doug Oatis’s latest climbing adventure).

So to all of you out there:

Best Holiday Wishes and a Very Happy New Year