Happy Holidays and Merry New Year from The Focus

Here we are again. At the end of another year.  It has been a big year for The Focus, PADT, and for ANSYS in general.  It is our last full week of work for 2012 here at PADT so we always like to finish up the year with a summary article, looking back and looking forward.

The Focus

We published 48 articles to The Focus blog in 2012, well 49 if you count this one.  That brings the total on the blog to 194, but the real number is higher because the old newsletters show up as one posting, and not the 3-4 articles per issues that they contain.

Which reminds me, a big THANK YOU to everyone who sends emails or leaves comments thanking us for doing The Focus.  We do enjoy doing it and getting a note now and then is frosting on the cake.

The biggest change to The Focus was the fact that it has a new home and it is no longer alone. With the launch of our new website we moved to a WordPress server for our blog, and we have added other non-ANSYS topics to the blog. So now our customers in the product development and rapid prototyping world can enjoy our immature wit and pseudo-wisdom.

We were also able to get more than a few Webinars out there.  In fact, we did 16 Webinars on topics from new tools we resell (VCollab and Flownex) to introductions on EKM and how to do a user routine in ANSYS Mechanical APDL.  All of the webinars can be viewed as recordings.

PADT

The year of 2012 was not a year of big changes for PADT, but a lot of little ones that added up.  We continued to grow our presence in our corner of the US with growth at our Colorado office and salespeople in New Mexico and Utah.  We also completed all of the modifications to our main facility in Tempe, AZ and have been enjoying an almost construction free work environment for most of the year.

The big change was our new website.  But I mentioned that already…

It has been a good year for compute power at PADT.  Our sales of CUBE HVPC systems has been picking up and we have added more of these awesome systems to our own pool of servers.  It was a bit of a risk to start building custom computers for simulation users, but we have been able to make our customers happy and deliver some truly fast boxes for very reasonable prices.

We continue to see growth across all three of our business units: Simulation, Product Development, and Rapid Prototyping. Our prototyping group had a true breakout year with record numbers of prototypes delivered to customers and big growth in the sales of our Support Cleaning Apparatus.  We also completed a couple of very large injection molding jobs that we helped set up.

On the community front we continue to support STEM education efforts, with some new efforts in the Denver area and more support Arizona. We have also participated in more Angel investments and PADT is now a regional sponsor of the Cleantech Open.  We are also proud of our very own Jen Ayers who has stepped up to be the president of the local chapter of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.

ANSYS

We started out 2012 getting up to speed with ANSYS 14.0, which was introduced at the end of 2011.  There was so much new stuff that we barely got it all under our built when we got 14.5 last month.  We have been very pleased with the efforts of the development teams during the year, especially in meshing, load mapping, and advanced blade row capabilities, just to name a few.

And ANSYS, Inc. as a company did well, they started 2012 at $57.39, look to be finishing at around $70 with a worst at $55.21 and a peak of $74.37.  22% growth if it finishes at $70/share. Not a bad year, better than the DJI or NASDAQ.  This puts the market capitalization at around $6,400,000,000. I put the zeros in there for effect.  It is very impressive for those of us who were around when they  first went public.  Their 10 year performance is far and away above any other company in the space.

And speaking of growth, ANSYS, Inc. acquired Esterel Technologies, expanding their footprint in simulation to simulating imbedded systems.  We also saw further integration of all of the acquired products under the Workbench and organizationally.  The thing that still amazes us is that with all this growth we still see the same vision and focus, and still the attention to the little features and functions that users ask for.  We deal with a lot of software companies and have seen a lot of acquiring. No one stays as focused as ANSYS, Inc.

2013

This coming year is looking good.  Here in the US we may finally get out of our slow growth period and see some robust expansion… if our politicians can stop fighting and end the uncertainty.  PADT is ready for some good growth and we hope to get into some new technologies, meet some new customers, and see some new business.

The folks at ANSYS, Inc. are working away at ANSYS 15.0, which is going to be another major release. We will be here for our customers as we all learn 14.5 and funnel feedback to the proper channels to help make 15.0 even better. We also hope to see a growth in our usage of other physics in 2013 and more advanced materials, it seems like our customers are headed that way so we want to get there first.

And for The Focus, expect more of the same. We have a whole list of posting ideas and will try and hit the ground running when we get back from the holiday break. Maybe in 2013 we can break that 50 article threshold.

W want to wish you, your co-workers, your family, and your friends a very happy holiday season and we hope to prosper with you in the new year.