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70 The PCB Design Magazine • April 2017 all time, by the way, that they're spending not designing any- thing whatsoever, which is what they love, but also secondarily is detrimental to the organizations they work for. Warner: Why does Altium pay so much attention to the individ- ual designers? You're not talking about huge OEMs. Romine: Well, we pay attention to them because those are other people that buy our products. If we look at the evolution of the industry, everybody starts out selling one product or one piece of software, for example, to an individual with an aspira- tion of moving on from that into a strategic type of selling environment where we're doing business with these huge OEMs. The reality is just by the nature of that we were always the smaller player in the industry. Of course, that's all now changed. We, secondarily, did not have a broad offering. This is what we do: printed cir- cuit board design. It allowed us to really focus by necessity, and by design, on those users. The reality is we didn't have a portfolio of 20 products to go into an executive's office and say, "Let's build some strategic solution for your organization." We were always doing business, you could call it business-to-business, but it was really what I would coin a new term called BTU, which is business to user. Now secondarily to that and the byproduct of that are the more corporate oriented goals: time to market, product and development costs, and product quality. Those are the three biggies. And overwhelmingly we find our users are aware of that, but that's not the emotional connec- tion they have with what they do. It's "I want to design something." I say is it's a disease in these organizations, with symptoms that mani- fest themselves in two different ways. If you're an executive, it's time-to-market, it's product and development costs, and quality targets. If you're a user, it's all just a big distraction from the thing you really want to do. Warner: But what specifically does Altium do that gets designers out of that minutiae and able to spend more time doing the things that they love, which is designing? Romine: Overwhelmingly, it's encapsulating more of the de- sign process into our single ap- plication, which is Altium De- signer. Then taking that directly to the user space and developing technologies that reduce those non-design oriented tasks, tak- ing those away and automating those wherever possible. Warner: You said that 61% of their time is spent doing non-design related activities. Do you have an idea what percentage of time that frees up? I know that's very hard to measure. Romine: It is, and we tried to measure it once. In our first really steep growth curve that we had, in the 2007 – 2010 timeframe, we sur- veyed our customers and at that time we were counting the number of competitive users we were acquiring. We kept counting and we got over 2,000 new users in the course of a year from verifiable competitive users. These were people using Cadence or Mentor products primarily. We surveyed them and asked how many of them had experienced an improve - ment, and it was overwhelmingly in the 80% range. Of those users, we surveyed what percentage of productivity they had seen and 86% of the group they saw productivity enhancements said it was 200%. Warner: Wow. That's a shocking number. Romine: Yeah, it is. That's why I don't care to use it too much, but it's significant. We were public with this data. Just to give you an ex- ample, Judy, you look at the anecdote I told you about being in distribution, dealing with engineers, disseminating data to them, getting price breaks, lead times, and forecasts, all this sort of supply chain oriented stuff, and when ALTIUM FOCUSES ON THE DESIGNER FIRST