Industry Update: Analysis & Simulation Software

Thursday, November 01 2007 Short agrees that while the simulation market is fairly mature, there are still opportunities for niche applications to take hold. “It takes many manyears of intense R&D to create the infrastructure, architecture, and functionality necessary for robust, reliable, and accurate simulation software,” he explained. “So in that sense, the barrier to entry is very high. However, for niche applications, this is not so much the case. There will always be opportunities for small players to emerge based on a new technology that has applications for a narrow class of problems in specific industries,” added Short.

According to Peery, CFD is one area where new players could emerge. “Because there are many specialty areas for CFD application, I believe there will remain room for new and emerging players that focus on doing one type of analysis better than the large ‘general-purpose’ solver,” he explained.

Said Benell, “With the number of established applications and vendors in the simulation and analysis software market as well as the ever-increasing capabilities of open source offerings, it’s easy to say that the market is mature and has little opportunity to grow.” However, he said, “continued technical advancements and associated market demands still provide ample opportunities for growth and expansion.”

The ultimate goal for the market, said Bussler, is to keep moving toward virtual prototyping. “We’re all continuing to move toward what we’ve known is wanted: true virtual prototyping, where a person working on a computer can simulate the testing of a product design as realistically as can be physically performed in a laboratory.” He explained that “this ultimate goal can only be achieved if the computer hardware can support that kind of simulation. We still need even faster, more powerful, better integrated systems. With the continuing development of multi-core computing, we’re getting there.”