SimScale: The Cloud-Based Simulation Platform that is Democratizing CAE

In an interview with Insights Success, David Heiny, CEO and Co-founder of SimScale, shares his insights into the company’s journey and its simulation solutions and services. This interview includes details about the company’s core competencies and its role on the market.
David is a co-founder and the CEO of SimScale. SimScale is a cloud-based simulation platform that brings together CAE functionality, content and people. Prior to SimScale, David held various mechanical and software engineering positions, including co-founder of an engineering simulation service provider. He holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics and CSE from Georgia Tech and Technical University Munich.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between David and Insights Success:
Tell us about SimScale 
SimScale is the world’s first production-ready SaaS application for engineering simulation. We’ve moved high-fidelity physics simulation capabilities from a complex and cost-prohibitive desktop application only available to experts in large corporations to a simple to use web application accessible to any designer and engineer via a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Our vision is to make simulation a standard tool in every engineer’s and designer’s software stack. SimScale is based in Munich and Boston and currently employs more than 60 team members.
What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by SimScale? 
SimScale offers state-of-the-art FEA and CFD capabilities for structural, thermal and flow simulations via a standard web browser. As the platform is completely cloud-based, our customers benefit from seamless collaboration capabilities and practically unlimited computing power, supporting the most sophisticated simulation projects. Our customers have used SimScale to design complex products ranging from small electronic components, to race cars, ships and high-rise buildings.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of the company. 
From the very beginning, SimScale’s mantra has been that the success of our customers is our success. Only if our customers gain a positive ROI on their investment in simulation, will we be successful. Because of this, the driving force behind how we build our product, how we organize support and what we do on a daily basis has always been our customers and the engineering challenges they face.
What are the challenges faced in providing simulation solutions and how is SimScale serving to tackle them? 
For businesses interested in using engineering simulation as a product development tool, integrating it into their workflow traditionally meant overcoming several barriers: the cost, maintenance and rollout of high-performance computing hardware, procurement of simulation software often for more than $50,000 per seat, and hiring or training specialized personnel capable of using it. SimScale removes these barriers by providing an end-to-end simulation workflow completely in the cloud with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Thanks to the seamless collaboration with our specialized support staff as well as a large community of engineering professionals, onboarding and hence time to effective use is cut to a fraction of the time required with traditional CAE software.
What according to you could be the potential future of simulation solutions and how does SimScale envision its role in it? 
We believe that engineering simulation has a bright future. Until now, simulation has primarily been used as a design validation tool in the late phases of the product development process. In the future, simulation will play an important role across the entire product life cycle. This process is already beginning, as increased accessibility is seeing a wider range of industries use simulation earlier in the development cycle — this is what SimScale focuses on today. Beyond that, we’ll see simulation being used to train hardware as well as during operation to monitor performance. IoT and Digital Twins are concepts that will lead to not just simulating a design before manufacturing but actually simulating a single product instance during operations, e.g., predictive maintenance.
Here are a few testimonials from SimScale’s customers. 
1) “SimScale is an incredible platform. It increases access to CAE for users of all abilities. It has the potential to totally change the industry and has the capabilities of reaching considerably more users. The interface is incredibly easy to follow and allows to quickly gain a high level of competence” — Mark Byers, Hydrodynamics Engineer at Scotrenewables 
2) “SimScale’s user-friendly interface simplified the task to a great extent. Moreover, SimScale’s customer support is admirably good. The online support and sharing of project facility is one of the features that separates SimScale from other CFD software.” — Sujaat Ali, Senior Mechanical Design Engineer at Larsen & Toubro 
3) “The nice thing about SimScale is that you can essentially run an unlimited number of simulations simultaneously with no reduction in computational resources, because SimScale opens up each simulation on independent nodes. This is a huge advantage for us, because we are typically under heavy time constraints.” — Daryn Bertelson, CAE Engineer, Aqseptence Group 
Source: The 10 Most Trusted Simulation Solution Providers 2018