Altium 365: Rapidly Gaining Traction Throughout Electronics Industry

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Collaboration has long been a major challenge for the electronics industry. The advent of COVID-19 underscored the urgent need to streamline collaboration to empower remote work. Altium’s latest innovation, Altium 365, arrived at precisely the right time.

The cloud-based Altium 365 platform creates seamless collaboration points across the PCB development process, making it the most connected design experience in the industry.

The platform’s popularity has grown exponentially since its official launch on May 1, 2020. Within mere weeks of its release, 2000 companies have adopted Altium 365, with over 5000 active users on the platform to date.

By engaging all key stakeholders, from electrical and mechanical engineers to upper management and manufacturing partners, Altium 365 connects the entire workplace ecosystem, affording greater clarity and collaboration than ever before. The platform also gives users a greater level of transparency with their customers, allowing teams to share designs at every stage in the design process.

Increasing Transparency Between Management and Teams

Apollo Fusion, a Bay Area startup, develops propulsion engines that enable satellites to power global internet connectivity. For a startup company, maintaining a level of transparency is essential from an investment perspective. Management has to continuously communicate with investors about product roadmaps and scheduled launches. With the first major launch on the immediate horizon, Apollo Fusion needed to find a way to connect their R&D team, management, and investors quickly and easily, ensuring all key stakeholders had the most accurate, up-to-date information on product development.

The company found their solution with Altium 365. As Tejesh Makanawala, Director of Power Electronics at Apollo Fusion, explains, “Credibility is a big factor at Apollo Fusion. Our CEO is very involved with what we do, so Altium 365 helps him stay in the loop. Management can get insight into how projects are progressing, which has increased the accuracy of their reporting to our investors substantially.”

Making Multidisciplinary Teamwork Easier

Altium 365 makes it possible to share PCB designs and collaborate with anyone - in any time zone, at any company. In conjunction with Altium Designer, Altium 365 is poised to transform the electronics industry by bridging the gap between PCB designers, mechanical designers, manufacturers and part suppliers through seamless collaboration between all key stakeholders as the design evolves.

Kinetic Vision, a Cincinnati-based design, engineering, and development firm, is an innovator’s one-stop-shop for transforming even the wildest ideas into real products. The company’s one-stop-shop approach keeps everything in-house, including industrial design, mechanical and electrical design and engineering, and short-run production.

In January 2020, Kinetic Vision moved over to the cloud-based Altium 365, just a few weeks before the COVID-19 crisis began sweeping the United States. The platform became even more essential because the team members could continue to work remotely.

As Michael Weston, Lead Engineer in Kinetic Vision’s Product Design and Development Group, explains, “We have firmware developers, system engineers, project managers and mechanical engineers using Altium 365 as a viewer/markup tool for our designs. The systems we used previously required us to spend extra time and effort to visually align the components as we moved from mechanical to electrical CAD. Altium 365’s unbeatable visualization tools give us a true experiential vision for workflow.”

Building Better Trust with Customers

Complex PCB designs can be a lengthy process, impacting everyone from design teams to customers. Oftentimes, designs can take months to complete. Longer lead times are particularly frustrating to customers of engineering services bureaus, who are eager to see where their projects are in the development stages. With Altium 365, customers can be included in the design process with ease.

Paul Payen de la Garanderie, Founder and Owner of AW Audio, an engineering services company based in France, is all too familiar with these challenges. The development of electronic products is a very lengthy and costly process, which makes his customers particularly eager to see how work is progressing.

Paul quickly found with the addition of Altium 365, he could bring everyone onto the same page, from his customers to his component manufacturers. He now uses Altium 365 every day with customers and prospects. “Altium 365 is a starting point for some of my customers because they can see me solving challenges as I work on projects. All I have to do is pull it up on my laptop and it’s right there,” Paul adds.