PAW 2019 Conference Series - Mark Do Couto - Altair

Welcome to the 2019 Predictive Analytics World (PAW) Conference Series. Recorded live in Las Vegas, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Mark Do Couto, VP of Worldwide Sales, Data Intelligence at Altair. Find Mark Online: Email: [email protected] LinkedIn Altair [00:02] My guest today is Mark Do Couto, Altair.  Mark, what do you think about the show so far?   [00:08]   It’s a great show.  It seems like there’s a good turnout.  Lot of great, interesting customers here.  It’s always good to see a lot of traffic and fellow vendors that are out here supporting. [00:20]   I really like how they laid everything out.  This is my first time at this particular event, and I feel like they’ve really nailed the cross-pollination between the attendees and the exhibit hall. [00:29]   Yeah, it’s really cool that some of the speaking engagements and stages are kind of opened into the exhibit hall; so, it makes a more natural flow.   [00:37]   Yeah, totally.  So, Altair – got it, right – is a recent acquisition or acquirer.  Tell me a little bit about the core business.  [00:46] Yeah, so, Altair, as a company, is traditionally a manufacturing and engineering company.  Focus on design, lot of time spent in the automotive, aerospace. But they really want to look into data and really get into the data space.  So Altair acquired Datawatch in December of last year. And Datawatch has a full suite of products, which goes straight from data preparation to predictive analytics to our own visualization software.  And most of our customers are based in financial services, which is completely outside of what Altair focuses on, which is a reason they were really excited. They were excited for us to stay in the market that we’ve been playing in, but also see how we can bring this into kind of the traditional manufacturing and engineering space.          [01:28] Oh, that’s interesting.  So it sounds it’s 0like a value-add to their existing, their core business but then maybe moving into another market?   [01:35]    Exactly.  So they, basically, have now acquired a company that already has customer and share in another market, but we’re having really interesting conversations with their traditional customer base:  a lot of helping predict machine failure, doing predictive maintenance on the manufacturing floor. So some really interesting use cases are coming out of their traditional customer base.    [01:57] That is actually really interesting.  Yeah, the downtime on, you know, if a cog goes out on a machine is catastrophic from an ROI perspective, right? [02:06]   Absolutely. [02:07] So being able to predict when machines are going to need maintenance and that kind of thing is actually a big industry that a lot of people don’t know about.