Celebrating 40 years of innovation
Below are some articles written by ESI employees, sharing their best memories on this special occasion!
You can find a chronology of our historical landmarks here http://www.esi-group.com/company/about/history and read our magazine's Special Issue there http://www.esi-group.com/company/about/esi-talk-magazine.

Chairman
It has been 40 years since Jacques Dubois, Iraj Farhoomand, Eberhard Haug and I, four PHD graduates from UC Berkeley, created ESI. Originally a consulting company, developing simulation techniques based on Finite Element Analysis, we carried out our first studies for the defense, aerospace and energy sectors. We were far from knowing what would come next, from our first virtual car crash in 1985, up until today...
With over 1000 employees in 44 countries, ESI delivers Virtual Product Engineering solutions to our customers across many industry sectors, including automotive, heavy industries, aerospace, defense, energy, electronics, consumer goods, healthcare, education and more. ESI empowers manufacturing industries to face the greatest industrial challenge: to deliver innovative products at lower cost, faster, and with increased reliability.
It has taken ESI 40 years to develop the scientific expertise that today enables our customers to virtually manufacture and assemble, part by part and end-to-end, physically realistic virtual products and components, long before their physical prototypes can be tested. The technical, financial, time-related gains we can bring are huge.
As competition has become global, and as the new mantra for the most industrialized countries is ‘outcompute to outcompete’, the concretization of ESI’s efforts comes at the right time. ESI’s thorough expertise is increasingly renowned, identified as valuable and sometimes critical, in order to generate the technologies that will help our customers build innovation gaps that create competitive advantage.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, one thing remains unchanged: ESI’s enthusiasm, commitment, and ability to help our customers get their products and processes right: robust, innovative, for the right cost and at the right time.
I hope you will enjoy getting to know us a little bit more by reading our employee stories below, celebrating our 40th anniversary. On this unique occasion, some of ESI’s engineers have shared with you their best memories, so we can reflect on the technological progresses we have made over the past 40 years. You will also learn what we have been up to lately, enriching our portfolio and teams with expert solutions, bringing answers to industrial challenges that turn into customer successes, and building our future with long-term strategic partnerships.
Click on the titles below to read the full story
- Eberhard Haug, Co-founder of ESI Group, speaks about the origins of PAM-CRASH, ESI’s first flagship software, and recount tales of ESI’s first car crash simulation for Volkswagen, in 1985
- Carole Michel & Pierre Viossat, speak of their experiences as Project Managers for Virtual Seat Solution
- Yasuhiro Matsuoka, COO of ESI Japan, commenting on the invaluable contribution of Nissan and Honda to development of ESI’s Virtual Performance Solution
- Eric Daubourg, COO of ESI France, recalls the history of the relationship with AREVA
- Michael Bloor, COO of ESI North America, highlights the development of ESI vibro-acoustic solutions based on works for NASA