The acquisition allows Altair to broaden its product suite to address new markets requiring greater computational resources in the life sciences, energy, research, logistics, manufacturing and financial industries. PBS Pro technology will become the flagship product of Altair's Enterprise Computing business line, which provides software and consulting services to help companies with high-performance computing requirements achieve maximum return on their technology investments.

PBS Pro and Open PBS technologies help Altair's customers optimise the utilisation of enterprise computing environments by intelligently aggregating and scheduling computational resources. Key benefits of PBS Pro include:

• Increased utilisation of current computing and network resources
• Reduced burden on system administrators so they can focus on other activities
• Enhanced understanding of computational requirements and user needs for future capacity planning
• Expandable distribution of production workloads across wide-area networks to maximise utilisation
• Logical organisation of physically separate computing systems

"This acquisition is an extension of Altair's business strategy to provide a variety of industries with solutions for high performance computing and innovative product engineering and design", stated Jim Scapa, president and chief executive officer of Altair. "Automation, numerical methods for optimisation and robust design are dramatically putting a constraint on computing resources in almost every industry, from product development to bioinformatics. PBS Pro technology addresses these market constraints and will help to grow the Altair customer base accordingly."

Over the past year, Altair has been a value-added reseller and implementation partner of Veridian's PBS Pro. Clients using PBS Pro include the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, U.S. Department of Energy, Lockheed-Martin Corporation, the Boeing Company and the Ford Motor Company to improve the computing capacity and efficiency of each organisation.

Altair has been working with Ford Motor Company's Numerically Intensive Computing (NIC) Department to leverage PBS Pro workload management software to increase job execution efficiency and improve service levels to NIC customers. Altair's continued collaboration and support has helped Ford to effectively maximize their capital investments in high performance computers.

As part of the agreement, the PBS development team, software and technical development will remain in Mountain View, California, headed by Dr. Bill Nitzberg, managing director and chief technology officer for Altair Grid Technologies. Dr. Nitzberg joins the company with over 20 years of experience in industry and research computing and is a member of the Steering Group and Director of the Scheduling and Resource Management Area of the Global Grid Forum.

Sales, marketing, customer support and distribution of PBS products will be managed from Altair's world headquarters in Troy, Michigan, by Michael M. Humphrey, Vice President of Altair's Enterprise Computing Business Line.