Altium Morfik acquisition

At last I can finally share with you some commentary about what has been rattling around the corridors here at Altium HQ for some time. We've just formally announced our intention to acquire Morfik and it's very exciting.

Picture this. You're an electronics designer and you've got a great idea for a new gadget. You've got all the skills necessary to design a PCB with some smarts in it and you can even program those smarts yourself. But then you come to adding some connectivity to the internet. You add an ethernet interface, update your smarts, and now you're ready to do the cloud stuff .... and you hit a brick wall. All that stuff about PHP and SQL and internet servers and SOAP and HTML and XML and Java and Ajax and ... It's a whole 'nother world!

So what do you do? As an electronics designer, you know about bits and bytes and if you were ever pushed on the point, you could probably even design the hardware for a web server. But when it comes to writing applications that exist in the cloud, where do you start?

Put simply, the Altium Morfik acquisition is all about giving you that starting point right out of the box. The philosophy is that pretty soon, every little device will need to be somehow connected to the cloud to maintain its relevance and appeal. And when it comes to designing those little neddies, you've got to start thinking about how and what you're going to connect it to. How will you pass data between your device and the cloud? Will it be via email posts, a simple Web server running inside the device, or will it be some other technique?

The cool thing about what Altium is up to is that pretty soon you won't need to worry about the implementation specifics of all that sort of stuff. Using Morfik's technology (which lets you write applications on a PC and deploy them into the cloud), and Altium's unified design strategy, you'll be able to co-develop new devices AND the cloud-based eco-systems that they plug into. So adding cloud connectivity and applications will be just as accessible to you as an electronics designer as it is to all those geeky CS dudes ;)

Hopefully it won't be long before I'll get to show you how this stuff works in practice with some real demos, but for the time being, I suggest you take a look at the videos on Morfik's website. We'll be adding more and more of this stuff under the Altium banner over time but take it from me, this is a state changer.

If you thought that Altium was a little out there as an EDA company, now we're off in the cloud!