Feature
The Bass effect Under the tutelage of CEO Carl Bass, Autodesk, the world’s largest CAD software provider, has gone from a one-trick pony to a multiplatform, multi-industry specialist. At the company’s 2013 product launch event Martyn Day talked to the enterprising leader about his vision for design, hosted solutions and what lies beyond the cloud.
Visionary: Autodesk CEO Carl Bass believes that the cloud will become ubiquitous and therefore nothing special
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AutoCAD WS, the online and mobile When combined with Vault, Buzzsaw and utodesk used to be a one product company. It would only run on DWG viewer and editor has been an amazing AutoCAD WS, Autodesk 360 extends the Windows and it was mainly used success with millions of DWGs being loaded design office anywhere a tablet or mobile for 2D documentation of design. onto phones and tablets and taken to custom- phone can go. Document distribution was stage one. In The last three years have seen an explosion ers or construction sites. SketchBook mobile has been incredibly the 2012 releases cloud services were includin development of new products, support for multiple operating systems, acquisitions and popular among digital artists and a new ed for free to Subscription customers, such as image effects tool Pixlr-o-matic is popular for cloud-rendering, design optimisation, energy a 3D solution for just about everything. and structural analysis. Autodesk is commitAutodesk professional CAD tools also had photo editing. The new range of analysis tools like ted to offering more and the 2013 products a reputation of being expensive, but with a slew of iPhone/iPad and Android applica- ForceEffect bring real-time analysis of sim- have been further architected to make use of tions that range from free to those that cost ple beam systems to mobile devices and the Autodesk 360, together with even tighter the equivalent of a couple of bags of chips, new BlueStreak Mobile from Labs brings col- integration for workflows between suites of that too is a reputation that probably needs to laboration technology with team communi- products that are now bundled together. While the software continbe readdressed. ues to get more capable, it is Under CEO Carl Bass, the obvious that an increasing porcompany is looking to get its Carl Bass sees a future where design tion of the benefits of new vertechnology to as many far flung documents are stored in the cloud and sions will be capabilities that areas as possible. Autodesk need to be run on Autodesk’s software covers Entertainment applications that were previously installed cloud-infrastructure. and Media, Manufacturing, on personal hard drives become irrelevant The benefit here is that comPlant Design, Architecture plex computations can be Engineering and Construction offloaded to huge web servers, (AEC), General design docufreeing up the local machine, together with mentation, Games, Document Management, cations and notifications to mobile users. Cloud hosting and all types of Analysis. More than any other CAD vendor, the getting very fast results. Mr Bass talked ‘cloud’ has quickly found its way into all of about these new tools providing analysis and Mobile and the cloud feedback on designs, together with results Autodesk’s professional offerings. Somewhat confusingly, Autodesk Cloud, spanning multiple variations based on one While previous launch events have concentrated on products and features, Autodesk which originally launched late last year, has design being submitted. While this is undoubtedly the most practitook a different tack this year, focussing on already been renamed ‘Autodesk 360’. Mr its breadth of development, especially on Bass explained the reason for this was the cal and immediate benefit from having a lack of longevity he attributes to the word cloud-based strategy, Autodesk is continuing emerging trends with mobile and the cloud. Mr Bass explained that while it took ‘cloud’. In two years time, it will be ubiqui- to experiment with streaming apps from the cloud. Mr Bass has said on a number of occaAutodesk some 20 years to get its first 11 mil- tous and therefore nothing special. Autodesk has already provided this free sions that Autodesk has Revit, Maya and lion customers, over the last three years, with mobile applications, the company has man- hosting service, together with additional Inventor comfortably running on an iPad functionality for Subscription customers. over a wireless network. Now, if only there aged to add more than 11 million.
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March / April 2012
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