 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
Ansys quietly builds business in computer-aided design Sailing through tech turmoil Thursday, May 31, 2001 By Stephanie Franken, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
For more than 130 years, the Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley was lost, entombed in sand off the coast of Charleston, S.C. At the turn of the 21st century, a Canonsburg software company called Ansys Inc. would play a crucial role in its recovery.
The submarine -- and the nine Confederate soldiers who operated it -- had been missing since February 17, 1864, the day the Hunley fired a torpedo into a Union warship, the USS Housatonic. The 7.5-ton sub managed to sink the 1,240-ton warship and then sent a blue victory flare into the night sky above Charleston. But the Hunley never returned to shore; it simply vanished.
The sunken craft wasn't found until 1995, after a 15-year search led by novelist Clive Cussler and a group he founded, the National Underwater Marine Agency (NUMA).
While finding it was no easy task, raising the fragile vessel from the ocean floor was another matter altogether.
That's where Ansys came in. The 30-year-old company makes software that simulates a real-world environment -- such as the sandy ocean floor -- on a desktop computer, to help engineers design and test new projects quickly and safely.
While the effort to recover the Hunley was big news in Charleston and worldwide, Ansys' significant role in the project was largely invisible.
For the scientists charged with raising the Hunley, the stakes were high. If the recovery effort failed, the Hunley -- which promised to contain a wealth of information about the Civil War -- would break apart in the water. If that happened, the remains of the crew would be lost at sea, along with a bevy of artifacts, including a famed gold coin said to have saved the life of a soldier when a bullet ricocheted off it during the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. "We had only one chance to do it right," said Leonard Whitlock, senior project manager.
So Whitlock and his colleagues turned to Ansys software to assess the submarine's structural weakness after it had lain in saltwater for 130 years. They then used the software to develop and test an unorthodox method of raising the vessel: They would place 32 nylon slings under the Hunley, support it with a steel structure from above, and squirt foam along the sides of the sub to replace the sand that had supported it for more than a century.
As thousands watched, the team's recovery succeeded, leading to the recent discovery of the gold coin. And the software, which "drove the whole recovery method," allowed the team to accomplish the project a year ahead of schedule, said Whitlock.
In addition to some high-profile restoration projects such as the Hunley, Ansys software has been used by more than 7,000 customers to build a faster sailboat, a shatter-resistant cell phone and a heat-conserving coffee cup.
The technology can determine how well a structure -- from a simple widget to a centuries-old cathedral in Dresden, Germany -- can hold up under stress, extreme temperatures, or changes in water or air pressure. It's an elaborate testing process that the computer can accomplish far more efficiently than humans, said Ansys President and Chief Executive Officer James E. Cashman III. "It's almost like trying to model infinity," he said of the software. "It's taking engineering alchemy and making it easy to use."
Ansys sells a range of software programs in the field of computer-aided engineering, or CAD. Its most recent version of its engineering software, DesignSpace 6.0, hit the market May 22.
Ansys is well-known among engineers with Ph.D.s, and last year, it made Forbes magazine's annual list of the country's best 200 publicly owned small businesses. But it hasn't gotten much attention from Wall Street -- a drawback it's trying to address as it grows into new markets.
Formerly Swanson Analysis Systems Inc., Ansys used to sell its products primarily to highly trained engineers, a small market with limited potential for growth.
In the mid-1990s, management began targeting design engineers with a new version of its software aimed at mainstream engineering tasks -- a much broader market that has allowed Ansys to grow more quickly and profitably.
"Putting our tools in the hands of design engineers allows us to expand our target market by 20 times," said Cashman, who took the helm of Ansys as president in April 1999 after serving as vice president for two years.
Ansys' revenue growth and its stock performance in recent years suggest the company's new direction is starting to pay off.
"The company has done unbelievably well in developing and selling a new version of its software that is more user-friendly for non-Ph.D.-level engineers, and even people without much training at all," said Kimberly Caughey, a software industry analyst for the Downtown brokerage Parker/Hunter.
Last year, Ansys said net income before acquisition related charges jumped 20 percent to $17.7 million from $14.8 million in 1999, while revenue rose 18 percent to $74.5 million from $63.1 million. Its stock was virtually unchanged last year, but has risen 31 percent so far this year, closing yesterday at $14.78.
Ansys employs 300 and has customers in a wide range of industries, from consumer goods to electronics packaging to biomedical products. An August 2000 acquisition of Berkeley, Calif.-based ICEM CFD Engineering added automotive and aerospace clients.
A recent bolstering of its marketing and sales force should help Ansys continue to grow at a healthy clip, said Parker/Hunter's Caughey.
While a high-tech company by any definition, Ansys largely missed the tech-stock boom of late 1999 and early 2000. But it also managed to avoid the bust that followed.
"During the dot.com boom, these guys were plugging along at 10, 15 or 20 percent growth," Caughey said. "Now, they're still plugging along at 10, 15, or 20 percent, and they're looking great. Thank goodness they didn't change their name to Ansys.com."
|
||||||||||||
