ESI user conferences underline growing presence in India

Paris: ESI Group successfully conducted user conferences in Bangalore and Pune, India. The conferences provided attendees with an excellent opportunity to learn about new projects undertaken by ESI customers and highlighted the growing importance of end-to-end virtual prototyping and its substantial benefits.

End-to-end virtual prototyping addresses virtual fabrication, building and testing of a product in coherent, progressive stages: part by part, component by component and per assembly, and concurrently across multiple domains. An effective virtual prototype enables at each step of the development cycle to concurrently test the performance, margins and robustness, in order to evaluate and correct, if needed, critical aspects of the product design or fabrication. Issues typically discovered only by building and testing real (hardware) prototypes are exposed up-front.

The user conferences allowed designers, engineers, analysts and managers from different industries to come together to share best practices, challenges as well as successes in virtual prototyping.

Conference attendees listened with interest to the key note speeches by Dr. Ashok R. Joshi, Deputy Director Automotive Research Association of India and Dr. Sarma Akella, Head CAE from Ashok Leyland. In addition, there were presentations from customers who shared their success with ESI solutions. These included: Tata Motors, IIT Bombay, Bilcare Research, BARC and BaeHal. Furthermore, attendees were able to get the inside track on ESI’s latest product features and associated benefits thanks to a range of presentations from ESI product experts in the areas of Virtual Manufacturing (Casting, Welding, Sheet Metal Forming), Virtual Performance, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Multiphysics, Vibro-Acoustics and Simulation Systems Integration.

The ESI India user conferences attracted over 100 ESI customers in Pune and 90 customers in Bangalore; numbers which emphasize ESI’s growing presence in the emerging Indian market. The user conferences in Pune and Bangalore brought together product development professionals from various industries and simulation domains and received excellent feedback, with 95 to 100% of attendees satisfied.

David Hudson, Head of NVH (Noise, Vibration & Harshness) at TATA Motors Ltd declared, “by meeting my industry peers and ESI product experts at the 2010 ESI India Forum, I was able to exchange experiences, understand common challenges and learn about new ways to improve product development. With the growing importance of Virtual Prototyping, ESI user conferences are must attend events.”

Venugopal Rallabhandi, Country Sales Manager at ESI India commented, “our growing presence in India now makes our user conferences a necessity. Between 2009 and 2010 ESI India recorded revenue growth of 33%, demonstrating our ability to meet the needs of the Indian market. ESI India now counts over 150 employees across sites in Bangalore and Pune, and serves the needs of a string of major organizations including: Nissan, General Motors, Renault, Tata Motors, Munjal Castings, Mahindra & Mahindra, Bilcare, 3M India Ltd, Ashok Leyland, GE India Technology Center, Bajaj Auto, IPR, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd and Whirlpool.”

ESI’s next user conferences on virtual prototyping will take place in September 2011 in Italy and in China.