Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1114420
34 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 It's not a case of FTPing or emailing files. We're all looking at the same thing, so that evolution is an enabler for companies like Al- tium to look at this very fragmented process and say, "We can't solve it all at once, but how can we start bringing pieces together?" I'm sure we're not the only ones, but we're fe- verishly working on things in our R&D area to create platforms that allow different functions and software tools to interact in a very agnos- tic way, meaning it wouldn't matter what com- pany you chose. Johnson: Where do you see Altium's vision go- ing for how to retool all of this? Were you al- luding to Altium 365 as a starting point? Arcuri: I was trying not to say that, so thank you for prying that out of me. Again, being a guy who was in the trenches at the last two companies I worked at, it didn't matter what went wrong; I was blamed because I was at the bottom of the hill—the manufacturers. I'm a big believer in not letting the marketing get too far ahead of the reality. You could look at some things that Altium has today that are public in- formation and guess what we might do with that if we thought this problem we've been talking about was a big problem. We thought that there was a great business opportunity in helping to solve it, and we are. For example, Octopart has a huge user fol- lowing, and it's absolutely not centric to Al- tium. Components are one of the major irri- tants in our life because, from a manufacturing perspective, if I don't have them, I can't put them on the board. From a customer perspec- tive, if I go to order them and can't get them because Cisco just designed that tantalum ca- pacitor into a product, the worldwide supply just went down to zero. Everything to do with components—physically, electrically, and re- lated to the supply chain—causes us lots of ex- citement in this industry. We have a thing called Ciiva, which is inter- esting and CAD-nostic. I would like to be cred- The Altium design rules editor.