Improving Electronic Design Collaboration by Shifting Left and Right

Listen in as Ananth Avva, SVP and GM at Altium, explains how new tools and a change in corporate culture allow non-electronics participants to participate and positively influence circuit and PCB design.

Ananth Avva is “a big believer that if you give human beings the right type of information and you contextualize it, they will make the right decision ultimately for the organization.” In his current role at Altium as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Platform, he is leading efforts to improve and accelerate collaboration because “collaboration trumps everything else” as it drives speed to market, lower costs, and more efficient development.

He has seen companies attempt to transition engineering teams to software-as-a-service (SaaS). In his experience, “that usually goes sideways pretty fast.” With Altium 365, Avva and his team are trying to seamlessly bring SaaS into engineering.

Altium 365 is an open electronics hardware development platform designed to provide secure, seamless, and streamlined collaboration

Altium 365 is an open electronics hardware development platform designed to provide secure, seamless, and streamlined collaboration. Image used courtesy of Altium

Their goals are to enable what they call shifting left and shifting right. When shifting left, they aim to take decisions that were traditionally late in the product life cycle and move those requirements earlier in the design process. This can allow the procurement, operations, compliance, and manufacturing teams to provide vital context for better design decisions. Similarly, shifting right passes design information downstream more quickly to avoid costly delays or respins.

If your organization is developing electronic products, you will benefit from this Moore’s Lobby podcast discussion hosted by Daniel Bogdanoff. Avva explains that companies consistently overestimate the cost of change and underestimate the benefits. They may also have the wrong “whys” behind why not to change. He goes on to explain that these can be “a bit of a phantom menace.” In his opinion, these are changes all companies will need to make to remain competitive in the market:

Let's say you don't do it. The world is headed that way anyway, so what happens? Let's fast-forward five years, you're gonna have to do it.

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Meet Ananth Avva

As senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Platform at Altium, Ananth Avva champions the product, go-to-market, and administrative functions behind the Altium 365 product family. He has over 15 years of leadership experience at multiple tech companies.

Ananth's experience spans several technology applications, including Google, advanced AI-based SaaS products, enterprise work management software, and a low-code workflow platform. Most recently, he was President and COO of Noble.AI, a company that was using adapted neural networks to solve multi-physics and multi-scale problems.

Ananth received his Bachelor's and Master of Science degrees in Accountancy from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Master's in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina, Kenan-Flagler School of Business.