This episode explores amazing technologies and techniques that add tremendous value to organizations looking for new and better ways to bring product to market and covers large scale simulations of real-world situations in the Azure cloud.
This episode explores amazing technologies and techniques that add tremendous value to organizations looking for new and better ways to bring product to market and discusses simulations of real-world situations in the Azure cloud.
Andy Byers, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Ansys, talks about product simulation priorities: more demand for compute, closing the loop between operations and engineering design, and autonomous simulation.
He also shares how working with Microsoft solves for the computing power needed to run simulations, what integrating their products into the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as sellable offerings means for Ansys as a software vendor, and how their partnership with Microsoft has been beneficial to them thus far.
Guests
Andy Byers has always been energized by learning modern technologies and has an impact across many fields in his role as Director of Strategic Partnerships at Ansys.
In this role, he helps architect and drive strategic alliances between Ansys and others organizations to unlock new engineering capabilities for shared customers.
Follow Andy on LinkedIn.
Diego Tamburini is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale.
He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.
Follow Diego on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Hosts
Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
David Starr:
Welcome to the Azure for Industry Podcast. We're your hosts, David Starr and Paul Maher. In this podcast, you hear from thought leaders across various industries, discussing technology trends and innovation sharing how Azure is helping transform business. You'll also hear directly from Microsoft thought leaders on how our products and services are meeting industry's continually evolving needs. Today folks, we're talking about some amazing technologies and techniques that add tremendous value to organizations, looking for new and better ways to bring product to market. Among a few other things this episode will cover simulations of real world situations in the Azure cloud. Andy Byers has always been energized by learning modern technologies and has an impact across many fields in his role as director of strategic partnerships at ANSYS. In this role, he helps architect and drive strategic alliances between ANSYS and other organizations to unlock new engineering capabilities for shared customers. So welcome, Andy.
Andrew Byers:
Thank you. It's good to be here.
David Starr:
Absolutely. We're delighted and also with us today is Diego Tamburini the principal industry lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience Team. Where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure at scale. He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure. Paul, I'm wondering if you could kick us off.
Paul Maher:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, David and welcome to the show. So Andy let's just start, maybe we can just begin by having you talk a little bit about ANSYS and the products and services that you provide. And then Diego, maybe I'll hand over to you and you can kind of just talk a little bit about the work that Microsoft's been doing in this space, but Andy, let's just start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about ANSYS and the products and services?
Andrew Byers:
Absolutely. Yeah, it's great to be here and I'd love to talk about this. So ANSYS is a public software company, we've been around for a little bit over 50 years actually. We're one of those few software companies that have been around for half of a century and it's been a really great story and it's great to be part of it. What we do is we build software that runs simulations on objects that exist in the real world. So for example, I could take a box, a wooden box and I could drop it on the ground and that would break, or that would bend if it was made out of something besides wood. And I could make a computer simulation of that exact thing, and predict exactly how it would break or bend in the real world.
Andrew Byers:
So this simulating world of looking at the physics and the fundamental science that's actually happening on three-dimensional objects ends up being really, really valuable to lots of companies. These companies will make these computer models to study how the heat or the flow or the bending or electrical current occurs over their products. We like to say, you can predict how computer chips will work inside of your phone, or the computers we're looking at right now or how potato chips will be cooked and be shot out of the machines and everything in between.
Diego Tamburini:
Yeah, regarding our partnership with ANSYS analysis is synonymous with our engineering analysis and simulation for many decades. And recently it's getting also into IoT and autonomous driving, and it's one of the most important ISV in the planet. We have a close relationship. Not only with our team but with other teams at Microsoft doing a lot of work on the compute side, on IoT, on the sensor data, et cetera. More specifically the work I involved with with ANSYS is about getting them on the Azure Marketplace. And the scenario basically is the ability to leverage the virtually infinite compute power of the cloud on demand when needed and paying as you go, that's specifically what I'm working on with Andy and the team.
David Starr:
Fantastic. And to get us going when I think of ANSYS I think about large scale. And the ability to scale up and down as we were talking about earlier Andy. So just to set us up for the podcast, can you give us a feel for, if we talk about compute power, maybe you could share some numbers, you talk about numbers of devices you touched. So just while the listeners are here what kind of scale are we talking about?
Andrew Byers:
Sure. Yeah, no problem. We actually can run quite a bit of problems on a laptop. Let's say I'm looking at a car perfect example when I'm describing to my great aunt at a family barbecue, what I do is I say, "Imagine a car crashing against a wall and I want to study how that car will actually crumble so I can make it safer." Clearly you want to run a lot of simulations for this. So if I was studying maybe the bracket that holds one of the doors on and I isolate to just that little bracket, I can actually run that on my laptop and I can simulate this.
Andrew Byers:
I have enough power to run that smallest simulation, but if I want to put together the whole car and study the very short duration dynamics that are happening and to make sure that going to be safe for passengers, that might take hundreds or even to the thousands of cores. So you can range from eight to thousands. In fact, the most intensive simulations we've run have been for fluid dynamics. So think really literally rocket scientists designing new rockets, and these can run on tens or even hundreds of thousands of compute cores. I've lost track of what the largest is, but it's in that range.
David Starr:
So, Andy, I understand that from Diego, in fact, that customers get into some initial digital simulation, and derive so much value from it that they then want to drive more decisions for better and faster product innovation. So what is top of mind for you in product simulation for the customers today?
Andrew Byers:
Before we talk about what I think customers want, you take a step back and you look at what's driving this... I say there's a perfect storm happening around the demand for simulation. And I think we're saying the same thing there. Number one, engineers, you hear this all the time. Nobody has any time, time to market is shrinking. Global competitiveness is growing. So you no longer can say, "Let's take two years to make this product." The turnarounds are nine months, six months, or even faster when you have technologies like 3D printing or additive manufacturing. So the demand for engineers to make decisions about how to build things is really through the roof. And that really, really puts a lot of pressure to do more and more simulation, to replace or augment costly physical testing in laboratories. This is one of the elements of the perfect storm coming together.
Andrew Byers:
Another is that you have IT departments and CIOs really looking to make their investments in computing match the investments of how they run the business. And so rather than make multiple year longterm investments and on-premise compute hardware, they're really investing in cloud and they're looking at across the enterprise. And then the third piece of the perfect storm here is really the impact of the global pandemic. With lots and lots of engineers working from home, unable to come into the lab, unable to access the compute resources that are at their companies is easy. It really pushes towards the cloud. So this is a combination of cloud and simulation demand coalescing into this moment we're at right now, which is a very interesting one.
David Starr:
Could you go a little bit deeper on the pandemic situation that you brought up? Are you running simulations and population... well, I should say population simulations on COVID.
Andrew Byers:
Well, so the pandemic, there's really two pieces there. Number one, with everybody working from home they need to have compute resources, compute power and so they're turning to the cloud. So the interest that we have in just cloud computing in general both for the high performance computing aspect, as well as just the dynamic collaboration, global collaboration, we're talking on Teams now. So imagine Teams for engineers, that's what we're thinking. So that's one piece of the COVID effect. The other is literally companies that are inventing technologies to help fight this terrible pandemic. So ANSYS has provided software and services to companies making ventilators we've provided simulation capabilities to companies that are looking at ventilation of buildings, indoor buildings. I was involved recently in a blog and a webinar where the gym that I go to here in Portland, Oregon ended up simulating the air flow in and out and optimizing it to create a safe environment as possible for its members.
Andrew Byers:
And we're doing that at schools and hospitals and all over the place. And finally look at the companies making vaccines. There's two parts of that problem, one is inventing the vaccine, the second is scaling up its production. When you think about scaling up vaccine production, you have to look at different kinds of mixer technologies. And how am I going to enable this unique vaccine mixture to mix properly and scale up a whole lot of it to help get it ready for distribution. And our simulations are involved in that aspect of the vaccine creation process as well.
Diego Tamburini:
Yeah. And I would say that also those simulations that sometimes you see on TV that of the spread of virus droplets and in the air and how the ventilation in a airplane cabin, all those are computational fluid dynamics problems that can be simulated and are simulated with ANSYS products.
Andrew Byers:
That's correct.
David Starr:
One thing I'd like to pull on just a little bit more that you've already mentioned is this relationship between the data that's collected from simulations, and then bringing that all the way back to design and even including operations and engineering teams. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that loop, that feedback loop and how it informs product development.
Andrew Byers:
I'd love to this is a very exciting area. So, so far I've been talking more about how cloud has this sort of flexible HPC and great total cost of ownership just to run any simulation from ANSYS, but that's focused on the engineering process. As I'm designing a part, I need to run these simulations to help optimize my design or come up with my design. But historically, that's when simulations have stopped. And so I'm done I make my part, I produce it in the factory and I ship it off and I install it. A battery pack on a bus or a pump in an oil field or a wind turbine on a wind farm somewhere. I'm not simulating that anymore because it exists in the real world.
Andrew Byers:
But what we're finding is you can actually create... You can take your simulation files and without much more work, I can create a simulation based digital twin of my actual piece of equipment. So that when I install my wind turbine and it's undergoing all these stresses and it's spinning and it's undergoing different inputs from the real world, I'm feeding those inputs via IoT into the cloud computing where my digital twin lives. And I have an exact replica of my real wind turbine existing there in a digital form that's undergoing the exact same stresses that my real thing is seeing in the world.
Andrew Byers:
Well, this opens up a lot of very interesting opportunities. For example, I can speed time up and look in the future and say, "Okay, if I'm going to be spinning at this rate and undergoing these stresses, when will it break? When do I need to get up and schedule maintenance on this?" So you get into this world of predictive maintenance and the accuracy and the insight that a physics simulation based digital twin gives you can be incredibly valuable. It can also enable you to optimize your performance. So maybe I'm realizing that I've been shutting it down too much. I've been too careful or I haven't been careful enough, and I can actually run it a little bit more without much wear and tear happening. All of these things are some very interesting ideas that are happening, and there's a lot of different industries that are working with us and with Microsoft to see how do we create and deploy these digital twins out in the real world, so we can leverage the value of simulation beyond just the engineering process.
Paul Maher:
Excellent. So let's, let's talk a little bit about the technology, and I'm curious how you're leveraging Microsoft technologies to help you achieve your solution goals. So you talked a little bit about sort of large scale compute, et cetera. But what I'll throw in there is for our listeners, perhaps those who haven't made the move from the cloud. Maybe you could also as you're talking about how you're leveraging cloud and cloud technologies, what's the journey been like moving to the cloud and leveraging either existing or legacy infrastructure, or even thinking about hybrid scenarios to move to the cloud, be curious to hear your thoughts.
Andrew Byers:
Yeah. Again, we've been around for 50 years and we've been involved with high performance computing initiatives the entire time. Our technology has always demanded more cores or GPU's or RAM, as much as you can throw at it in some cases. So we've been very involved in this. And so for the past 10 or 15 years, our customers have slowly been dipping their toe in the pool of cloud computing. And some have made that transition on their own, where they're essentially standing up a virtual machine and loading the software on there and doing it on their own, we call it the DIY approach. We've also worked with many cloud hosting partners where they've been the middleman there and help navigate how to migrate these solutions that we have that were not designed for the cloud originally onto a cloud system.
Andrew Byers:
And so that's been happening again for about the past 10 years, but a few years ago, we realized that to truly support our customers we needed to make this a product that we owned. We had to make sure that when our customers decided to make the transition to cloud computing from on-premise, that they were confident that we were going to be supporting that with our code and with our solutions and our support going forward. And that we were going to be optimizing the price performance of that solution and that we would be updating this. So as new cloud infrastructure comes whether it's different sorts of machine types or different regions or different interconnects types between nodes on a cloud competing system.
Andrew Byers:
That they could rest assured that our software worked great and had been tested on that before those customers start using it in production. So in order to do that, we had to take this ownership of our performance of our software on the cloud. We had to take that in house. Luckily we got to work with Microsoft on that. Obviously it was in Microsoft's best interest to enable our software to work efficiently because we have the same customers here. And so it's been very wonderful working with Microsoft from an architectural and support level, to make sure that our tools run efficiently and at a very high performance level on Azure.
Diego Tamburini:
And I would add that what I've seen from ANSYS that is great is that they understand the value of the cloud. They don't see us just as a hardware vendor that sometimes some compute-intensive applications see the cloud just as hardware. They understand that there is a lot of value in the services. And proof of that is that they're doing integrations with our IoT services, our digital twin services, high performance computing. So it's not just about yanking VMs into the cloud, it's about integrating with the past services that the cloud can offer.
Andrew Byers:
It's really good. If I could just add to what you said, Diego, that's exactly true. I make the joke that I throw a seed onto the ground and something starts growing immediately. As the person responsible for the partnership between the two companies, it's incredibly fertile ground. While it started out thinking about we need on demand, high performance computing, there's a lot of things attached to that. A lot of opportunities spring up around that are very beneficial and that give really good value to our shared customers. There's a quote recently from we had a press release recently and a vice president from Rockwell Automation quoted that these are the sorts of benefits that boost their engineering productivity. It's bottom line. Boosting as well as top line revenue. So enable them to make products faster, I'm seeing these two leading brands coming together and all these new offerings arising up out of different areas not just HPC alone it's very interesting to large customers like Rockwell.
Paul Maher:
No, that's fantastic just for all listeners, perhaps those who are just considering cloud or on the cloud journey. Andy are there any learnings you could share? You talked about, of course, technology innovation, it sounds like you're leveraging new capabilities. But if you think about starting that journey, building confidence in cloud and helping all listeners who may be considering cloud. Are there any things that you and your company had to come to terms with that you could share?
Andrew Byers:
I'm glad you asked that question. There's one thing that pops to mind right away. It's this co-selling motion because often when you're doing a partnership with another company, it can be a little confusing about who's leading and who's supporting, or how are we going to go to market together. And one of the things that's been very pleasant about working with Microsoft is that co-selling motion and really co-support motion of our joint customers, is very robust and is very mature. There's a very nice process that's been time tested that enable our sales teams to work together, put their heads together and ask how can we help this customer together in the right way. And it's done with a high sense of professionalism and efficiency.
Andrew Byers:
And I think that that makes our salespeople appreciate that. But most important, it really shows when we meet with the customers jointly. We're not wasteful of their time. And we put our finger right on the pain that they're having and how together we can solve that. And I think that really shows that these are two leading brands in their own markets coming together. And it's really not a half baked solution looking for a problem. We've taken our time to make sure that what we're doing solves real problems out there whether it's these digital twin use cases or high performance computing, or even getting into other solution areas like autonomous driving. It's really been exciting and a good journey so far.
David Starr:
And now let's take a moment out to listen to this very important message.
Speaker 5:
Did you know, the Microsoft commercial marketplace allows you to find and purchase leading Microsoft certified solutions from Microsoft partners? The Microsoft commercial marketplace includes Microsoft AppSource and Azure marketplace. Each storefront serves unique customer requirements and different target audiences. So publishers can ensure solutions are available to the right customers. For applications that integrate with Microsoft 365 products visit appsource.microsoft.com. Get solutions tailored to your industry that work with the products you already use. For B2B Azure base solutions, visit azuremarketplace.microsoft.com. Here you can discover, try and deploy the cloud software solutions you want.
David Starr:
So, Andy, you mentioned autonomous driving, and I have spoken with some of the folks at Microsoft who are involved in that type of work. And some of the things they've said to me are that they process and work with incoming petabytes of data ingested daily. And I'm talking about all of the sensors on those cars, producing a multiple stores of data that have to be brought together. And then somehow we have to make some insight from that pile of data that probably starts off as a data swamp. And the mention you made of digital twin. Well, I suppose if we're talking about autonomous driving, you would want to produce a digital twin of that as well. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Andrew Byers:
Absolutely. Yeah. It's definitely the case where, where these companies that are have these autonomous vehicle or ADAS programs. Autonomous driving assisted programs need to actually drive... If they were to drive cars with real sensors on them and use that data, they'd have to drive billions of miles, under many, many, many different conditions with slight variations between those conditions in order to prove that their car was safe. And they're just not going to be able to do that it would take decades, or hundreds of years to actually enable that much data and maybe more data storage than we have available to us. So they really need to use simulation. So simulation is a huge augmentation of the actual driving that happens. And in order to rely on simulation, you have to make sure that it's robust and that it's accurate. So that when I compare it to what I actually saw with my sensors on my real car, it's nearly identical.
Andrew Byers:
And it enables me to create my self-driving algorithms so that my car knows when I'm driving down a residential street. And I see a ball bouncing in front of me and a little boy running for it that I have to break immediately. If you think about the variations you need to simulate, I want to see that ball in the morning, at noon, in rain, at twilight, different colors of a ball, different colors of the shirt that that boy is wearing, different angles of the sun. And I want to see it with my camera, with my LiDAR, with my radar, all these different redundant systems that these cars have. So you look at the spread of scenarios that need to be considered and it truly is mind boggling.
Andrew Byers:
And this is where ANSYS has developed technology, both on our own and through some other partnerships we have that enable us to ask those questions and provide that input to these car companies. The next question they ask us is, "We need to run millions of those variations in a short amount of time. And that led us to our partnership with Microsoft." Migrating that software to Azure and making sure it's optimized, again, price performance is what we're doing right now and the initial feedback is very positive.
David Starr:
And once you've run some of these simulations does the data then turn around and go back into what we might consider IoT Edge that is running inside the car, so that the AI algorithms that are driving this car are contained within it. Is that how this works?
Andrew Byers:
Not directly. The simulation data, think of it almost like a machine learning or AI problem. So what we're doing is we're creating the data that is training the machine learning algorithms in a sense. So this data, these massive amounts of data we create it doesn't go in there directly, but indirectly it does. It teaches the sensing algorithms of the car. This is a little boy running in front of the street for a ball. No matter what color of the ball is, what time of day it is, what color shirt that little boy is wearing. And then those sorts of inference algorithms ended up going back into the car.
Paul Maher:
Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit about the Microsoft commercial marketplace and maybe I'll start with Diego to maybe help us ground all listeners on the Microsoft commercial marketplace. And then I'll hand over to Andy to talk about what ANSYS is doing on the commercial marketplace. So Diego, do you want to just share with our listeners a little bit about what the commercial marketplace is?
Diego Tamburini:
Sure. Paul, so the Microsoft commercial marketplace is our e-commerce platform that we've been using already for a while to sell our own Microsoft first party products. But since a couple of years ago, we've opened up to our partners, which we call third party solutions. It provides the ability to find, try and buy partner solutions that run on Azure in a much simplified way. So for customers, it makes it easier to purchase a solution and add it to their current Azure bill. And for ISV partners, it represents an additional sales channel and the way that increasingly we are using as a go to market with Microsoft. So we are also with Paul's team recently, the last couple of years, we've been doubling down on building the best industry ecosystem that we can. I personally, in his team, I focus on manufacturing and, of course, ANSYS is the who's who in engineering analysis. And it represents a great addition to the marketplace.
Paul Maher:
Thank you, Diego and then Andy, so Diego has picked up the Microsoft commercial marketplace. I'd love to hear the pragmatic view from yourselves on this, obviously, the online marketplaces is a new distribution channel. So maybe I could ask you, first of all, as a large and mature established company, why a marketplace would be interesting and maybe complimentary or hopefully complimentary to existing field sales models, and just your perspective on the value proposition for ANSYS.
Andrew Byers:
Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of like as we grow as a company and we start offering these other ways of getting in our technology, that are more aligned with SaaS models of consuming things, the marketplace provides some really good opportunities. For example, if somebody wanted to purchase... Maybe they already own a bunch of a ANSYS software, but they need to purchase some more capability to run this on Azure. Rather than going through the normal purchasing procedure with an ANSYS rep, if they had an opportunity to log into the marketplace and buy some ANSYS cloud capability swiping the corporate credit card more or less, that provides them some flexibility and some ability that is above and beyond the way they buy our software today. So there's some interesting ways to buy this add on capability that's opening up here.
Andrew Byers:
In addition, that also provides another value to the customers because as they start consuming this Azure credit, they not only are using it for the ANSYS simulations, but it can count against their own Azure commit to consume, which is a contract that some of these companies have with Microsoft so that's very beneficial to them. So the combination of that is a nice advantage of the commercial marketplace that goes above and beyond just awareness of our technology. But there's another interesting thing opening up another opportunity. ANSYS increasingly is selling less standalone software tools and more solutions that are a chain of tools tied together.
Andrew Byers:
We may have three or four different software solutions that work together in a aggregated flow than an engineering department would use. And so when you do this, you need a front end way to sell that whole solution and often interact with it in a SaaS software, Software as a Service model. And we're looking at marketplace as a way to enable that. Not only to show it to people, but it can spin up the computing environment on demand, when a customer interacts with the marketplace. And customers can even transact their business through the marketplace. And there's a very nice clean way of doing that to. This hopefully will open up some more revenue opportunities for ANSYS and expand the access to our software beyond our traditional user base.
Paul Maher:
Fantastic. That's great. Another question carrying on the theme of the Microsoft partnership. And maybe this is a question for both of you Andy and Diego for all listeners out there. Obviously, as we've mentioned ANSYS and Microsoft have had a longstanding partnership for a number of years and long will it continue. But for all listeners out there, perhaps you could share what that partnership entails and maybe share some of the.... You Andy some of the highlights and Diego feel free to also chime in on some of the work that we've been doing together, I'm sure all listeners would love to hear.
Andrew Byers:
The partnership really when we are trying to assess why are we coming together, it's sometimes as simple as just looking at the mission statements of the two companies to see if there's alignment there. Microsoft's mission is empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Turns out that ANSYS mission is empower our customers to design and deliver transformational products, so they both start with empower. So really are firmly fixed on who our customers are and how do we make them better. And the layer below that you look at the markets that ANSYS really works in, it's industrial, aerospace, automotive on down the list through electronics, energy, even healthcare. These end up being vertical industries that Microsoft has a very specific focus on as well. So there's another level of alignment. And finally, it's kind of telling a couple of quick stories of success.
Andrew Byers:
One is as we're looking at COVID we're right now looking at ways that we can simulate, as I mentioned, airflow in buildings. And so we have some discussions with some universities and some businesses around how can we make that easy to use, easy to visualize, and again very accessible to them because these are not the traditional simulation users. So this is where the combination of ANSYS and Microsoft together can reach out to this community in this huge time of need. The other interesting short story I'll tell is around autonomous driving. So there's a program going on right now called the Indy Autonomous vehicle Challenge, Indianapolis Autonomous vehicle Challenge. And if you just search Indy AV Challenge, you'll find it. And this is 30 or 30 plus universities from around the world are getting together and designing autonomous cars to drive around the Indianapolis 500 racetrack.
Andrew Byers:
And the race is going to happen in about a year from now, but we're doing virtual races and to do all this development of these algorithms and these cars, they're doing it through simulation using ANSYS on Microsoft Azure. And so we came together and the feedback has been tremendous and see these students really... from all over the world and remotely collaboratively working together is the perfect example of simulation on the cloud in a collaborative sense. So those are a couple of stories that make me very excited for the future.
Paul Maher:
Thanks Andy, and Diego anything else to add?
Diego Tamburini:
Like I alluded to earlier, I think that ANSYS has understood the value of working together if they see us as partners instead of just vendors. And when we are trying to compliment each other with capabilities and also presence in the market, so they're looking at their relationship from a comprehensive point of view that is not just based on, "Hey, do you have a GPU enabled virtual machines?"
Paul Maher:
It makes a lot of sense. And just for our listeners out there our partner ecosystem is essential for our success. It's the coming together of course the work that we do as the platform company. But the IP and the value add really is our partner ecosystem that provide that specialized knowledge, the specialized solutions on top. And what I like in pulling together what both you've said Andy, and what you were saying Diego is number one is is kind of partnership and a common kind vision mission.
Paul Maher:
And I love the synergies around and power that we have across ANSYS and Microsoft. And I think what's also being really good on the journey is being, of course, that transformation to the cloud. So I know that we've worked very closely in terms of ideation and providing guidance and best practices on building on the cloud, which has been great. And of course, with the finished solutions, it's then engaging our joint customers. The work that we've been doing together, really work together and closely to help our joint customers it's been great to see that. So really special partnership and it's great to see the work, and the impact that we're jointly driving together in the industry. David, back to you.
David Starr:
Thanks, Paul. Andy as we're kind of winding down here. We're running out of time as all things do. But I wonder before we do, if you could share a few things maybe where people could go to learn a little bit more about ANSYS, about the work that you do and the presence that you might have on the Azure Marketplace?
Andrew Byers:
Yeah, no, absolutely. You can see, we have a couple listings on the marketplace today, like I said, for ANSYS cloud, and it's really nice, a sort of a one-page shop. So if you just go to Azure Marketplace and search ANSYS in the field there, you'll see the ANSYS cloud one pop right up. And there's some nice videos and some nice little one-pagers that describe what's going on. Same thing with our autonomous driving solution called VREXPERIENCE that one will pop up as well. And there's some nice videos. So that shows you what's on marketplace. But the thing I always like to tell people, if they want to see a range of what we're doing, and of course we have a blog and ANSYS has its own blog site.
Andrew Byers:
But if you were to search...I always say this, if you Bing, ANSYS Startup Program. It's a very nice view at the companies that you don't really think about as using this high-end technology, which is startup companies. And these will be the future SpaceXs or the future Microsofts. These companies that are just creating the future. And at the bottom of that page, at the ANSYS startup page there's about six or seven or eight examples. And you can flip through the different examples real quick, and you get a real sense of the future being developed before our very eyes. So there's just a couple of places you can look not only on marketplace, but our own on websites if you want to see a little more.
David Starr:
I do have to say that when I went out and looked at your products on the marketplace, you'd included a lot of white papers, even case studies, things like that, that are really telling the story quite well for what people are able to do in simulation. And I thought that was really valuable even preparing for the show for myself to learn a bit more, so that was great.
Andrew Byers:
It's fun to look at the pictures. The industry joke is that we do Computational fluid dynamics, CFD, and some people say it stands for colorful fluid dynamics. So it is fun to look at.
David Starr:
Well, I'll tell you what, we're going to have some social media links on the show. We'll have links to your Azure Marketplace offerings and of course to ANSYS itself, your social media and also that of the company. And we'll look forward to people following up and following you as a result of the show.
Andrew Byers:
That'd be great.
David Starr:
I just want to say thank you and thank you Diego but particularly Andy, for taking your time out and being with us on the show today, it's been a really a fun conversation.
Diego Tamburini:
Thank you Andy.
Andrew Byers:
Absolutely. Thank you very much.
David Starr:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Azure for Industry Podcast. The show that explores how industry experts are transforming our world with Azure. For show, topic recommendations, or other feedback, reach out to us at industrypodcastatmicrosoft.com.