Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1062752
78 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2018 years, and I've never felt as excited as I am now. We've really set our sights high. Since 2014, we've had over 7,100 new customers come on board, which has been quite amazing. That comes out to more than 10,000 new licensed users of Altium Designer. Shaughnessy: So, that's from FY 2014 to 2019, basically. Donato: Yes, almost five years coming up here shortly. Dur- ing that time, the company has doubled our revenue from $70 million to over $140 million, closing in on our goal of $200 million by 2020. Our subscription tools, which are the number of active licenses that we have, have grown from 26,000 to 40,000. It's been exciting to see this continued growth. Shaughnessy: A couple of years ago, you were just excited to hit the $100-million mark, and now you're at $140 million. Donato: Our fiscal year ends this coming June. Then, the year after that, we plan to be at $200 million. By 2020, we are aiming to have dou- bled our revenue again. I can map these growth years with our continued innovation that our R&D team has shown every year. Last year, we had this easy, powerful, modern update of the Altium Designer product—Altium Designer 18. That brought on a whole new world of opportunity with its 64-bit capability, and here we are on the precipice of yet another release shortly. Shaughnessy: What do you think is driving this growth? Donato: One big factor I've seen as a company is our singular focus on PCB design; that's what has gotten us to this point. We've been extremely focused on PCBs in our user com- munity. I think that's our big differentiator as a company. We are very committed to users; we talk to our users, take feed- back from them, and interact with them. Recently, we just finished an AltiumLive event in San Diego, which was a phe- nomenal experience for not just users but the PCB community as a whole. This singular focus has brought us to where we are now, but I think the next leg of this journey begins with Altium 19 and 365 where we will take this singular focus on PCB and expand it throughout the con- necting ecosystem. We strongly feel that Altium 19 and 365, which have cloud- enabled capabilities, are the right vehicles to not only take us to the next level but also to our goal of reaching 100,000 subscribers. Shaughnessy: When people think about Altium as a company, they often think of Altium Designer, but you have other products too. What's your strategy for those products and the acquisitions of the last few years? Donato: That's allowed us to not only continue our singular focus on PCB, which has gotten us here today, but also to address the trans- formation in the electronics industry that we see with all of these connected devices. We see lots of new companies having to connect devices that never had to be connected to the internet before. To continue this innovation and help enable our customers to take full advantage of this trend, we need to connect beyond the PCB design space and into the ecosystem that surrounds it into disciplines and domains like manufacturing and the bill of materials. Some of our acquisitions have been for the technology, and we've taken that technology and put it into some of these new capabilities. Some of these acquisitions are also running business units, such as Octopart, which is—if you will—the Google search of components. Shaughnessy: Acquisitions like Octopart are integrated into Altium Designer, for instance. Chris Donato