Today in Pune, over 100 optimization and engineering enthusiasts joined the biennial ESTECO Users’ Meeting India, that gathers the users of VOLTA and modeFRONTIER software solutions. Founded in 1999 as a startup company, ESTECO has recently closed the celebrations for its 25 years in business. With this in mind, it was great to meet Nader Fateh, VP Business Development at ESTECO, and discuss what it takes to stay at the forefront of software innovation for a quarter century.
ESTECO is a multinational software company and hundreds of organizations around the globe rely on its software solutions to improve their products and processes. But let’s take a step back in time. Can you tell us how it all started?
Probably when our user community thinks of ESTECO they think of modeFRONTIER, our multidisciplinary, multiobjective optimization and process integration software. However, modeFRONTIER’s origins predate the founding of ESTECO, going back to a European project named “Frontier – Open System for Collaborative Design Optimization Using Pareto Frontiers” which ran from 1995 to 1999, and was partially funded by the European Union and partly by European industry, led by British Aerospace.
When that project ended, Carlo Poloni, who had been the lead researcher in Frontier, together with his fellow project collaborators Enrico Nobile and Luka Onesti, formed the company ESTECO and were awarded the rights to convert the resultant software code into a commercial product. Building on the deep understanding of engineering optimization methods gained during the Frontier project, along with their strong scientific, mathematical and computational backgrounds, ESTECO developed modeFRONTIER, a state-of-the-art process integration and design optimization tool, the first version of which was released in 1999.
And you had a crucial role in this expansion, joining ESTECO officially in 2003 when ESTECO North America was founded. But when did you cross paths with ESTECO for the first time?
I first met Carlo Poloni in the mid 90s over a glass of Prosecco at the company Electrolux in North Italy. At the time I was working for the CFD company Computational Dynamics in Germany, and Electrolux was a prospect of ours in Italy. After a period of testing, Electrolux decided to lease our CFD tool, but as they were involved in the Frontier project they requested that we also furnish Carlo’s group with software licenses in support of that project.
He and I kept in touch, and some years later when I was living in the USA, he contacted me to ask if I was interested in working for ESTECO. That was in mid 2003, and some months later we founded ESTECO North America, and have not looked back since!
What motivated you to team up with Carlo? Was it the person or the technology?
I would say it was both really. During the previous 15 years or so working in CFD I had often felt that it would have been very useful to have an automated way of driving a flow simulation in a feedback loop where an output metric could somehow effect a change of the geometry or some boundary condition.
And now here it was! A software robot, guided by a mathematical algorithm, which could automatically modify a geometric shape in order to achieve a user-specified goal, such as to reduce drag or increase efficiency. modeFRONTIER could do this and so much more!
But Carlo’s personality also played a big role. I had previously worked for another start-up, also founded by a university professor, and had joined them when they were about the same size as ESTECO was in 2003 so I had an idea of the type of person who might be successful in such an environment. Having already known Carlo for some years, I knew he was not only extremely competent technically but also very personable, which is an important attribute when starting a company. However, what I didn’t know then, but soon learned, was that he also had very good business sense, and could quickly grasp the big picture while keeping in touch with the development activity. I can definitely say that nobody knows ESTECO from top to bottom as well as Carlo does.
How did process automation and design optimization technology change during the years?
Back in the early 2000s people talked mainly about optimization and how to have our software drive as many different CAE tools as possible. We were frequently asked to benchmark our algorithms for different problem types, or couple to a particular solver.
However, gradually optimization became more of a commodity in a way, and many solver OEMs (CFD, FEA, etc) started to include an optimization algorithm to drive their particular tool. I would compare it to mesh generation for CFD – in the late 80s and early 90s industrial CFD was in its infancy, and the majority of the software companies focussed on the solvers, providing at most some rudimentary mesh generation capability. This left the field open for dedicated meshing tools which worked with a variety of commercial solvers. With time, however, the solver companies improved their mesh generation capabilities, and by the late 90s there remained only a couple of standalone meshing tools for niche applications.
Similarly, a software company which relied purely on optimization would have seen its market shrink significantly, restricted to driving smaller solvers which did not include an optimization algorithm as part of their package.
Now if we fast forward 20 years or so, users have become less interested in the details of the optimization algorithms, with many relying on autonomous multistrategy algorithms like modeFRONTIER’s pilOPT, which for the user is more or less a black box, and more demanding in their need for process integration, automation, accessibility and ease of use. Again we can draw comparisons with meshing for CFD – what used to be an art in itself is now an automated, pushbutton, process which users take for granted.
However, ESTECO’s founders were visionaries in many ways – for example, already in 2008 they were sowing the first seeds of what we now call business process modeling and enterprise collaboration. It took many years for Cardanit (ESTECO’s business process modeling SaaS solution) and VOLTA (our enterprise platform for SPDM and design optimization) to become the mature products they are today, but the planning started long before the market was demanding such solutions. Similarly, there has been a lot of focus on machine learning techniques over the last few years, but modeFRONTIER has offered ML, in the form of response surfaces, for over 20 years; after all, ML is a technique where a mathematical model uses known information to make predictions, which is exactly what RSMs do!
Now we are focussing on cloud computing, AI, reduced order models, and other techniques which will allow companies to innovate faster, and more easily.
What were your first footsteps in the Indian market, and how has that presence changed since the early days?
Our involvement in the Indian market goes back to the late 2000s when we first started working with local companies such as Tata, Bajaj and TVS. Initially we did not have anyone based directly in India, but as the demand for support grew, especially with some of our global customers such as Whirlpool, Cummins and Ford starting to use modeFRONTIER in their Indian tech centers, it became clear that we needed more presence. We established our Indian subsidiary in 2012, initially with one person, but quickly added more people to the support activity, as well as starting business development directly.
Soon it became clear that we could take advantage of our presence in the country and the availability of skilled engineers and software developers to go beyond software sales and support, adding locally based development and QA staff to our development team in Italy.
Seeing over 125 representatives from nearly 40 companies attend the User Meeting today, and witnessing the level of sophistication evident in many of the presentations, brought home to me just how far we have come since we first established the office here back in 2012.
Building on a quarter century of growth, how is ESTECO looking to the future? How do you plan to keep pushing the boundaries of innovation in engineering for the next quarter century?
I think that supporting our customers in the digital transformation means offering state-of-the-art solutions. Today’s IT product is very different to yesterday’s IT product, so we need to keep up with the latest technologies to continue our pursuit of technical excellence – but that’s only half the story. Our role is to adapt and select the best technologies available and use them to bring maximum value to the engineering community.
Keeping the users at the center of what we do has always been one of our core values, and this will be even more important in the future. Our strong relationships with customers is one of the main ingredients of ESTECO’s success. It really comes back to credibility: we can’t go down the route of so-called “PowerPoint engineering”, where we show that something can be done and give the impression that we’re already working on it just to get attention. We’re there to deliver; it’s about working with our clients, keeping them involved, making sure that they’re part of that decision process. This has always been one of our major goals, and I think is the way we contribute to actually help deliver that digital revolution. Many of our clients have told us that they see us more as partners than as software vendors, which is exactly what we have always striven to be.
From a technological perspective, our developers are working to harness the transformative power of AI, from deploying AI/ML models in modeFRONTIER, VOLTA and Cardanit, to using generative AI for ESTECO software design and development and AI-powered virtual assistants.
From a market perspective, partnering with our larger customers is key to penetrating industry in a wider sense. This means understanding emerging needs and trends in the engineering field, and beyond. The goal is to expand and scale our technology offer, in terms of data and business process management, to cover both the engineering departments and other divisions in the same company.
Thank you, Nader Fateh, VP of Business Development at ESTECO, for sharing your insights with DailyCADCAM. If our readers have any questions for ESTECO, they can reach out to us at sachin@dailycadcam.com.
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