The “day before Day One” kicked off with a media session packed with information. I’ll post in more detail when time allows but an overview will give some impression of the material covered:
Chris Bradshaw (SVP and Chief Marketing Officer) covered Autodesk’s approach to traditional markets and the emergence of cloud and consumer markets. From small beginnings in the days of mainframe, minicomputers design technology has grown enormously as PCs brought computing power to the desktop. Cloud computing, storage will accelerate that to the point where computing & mobile devices could outnumber their human masters. If that sounds extreme consider how many you own now?! - Steve Blum (SVP Worldwide Sales & Services) outlined the Autodesk customer base and how it is changing. Formerly mostly business and professional (from 1-5000+ employee companies) recent years have seen the growth of a consumer market. It is now the largest in terms of installed users, if not revenue. "Business as usual" is changing as mobile & the cloud drive organisations to change their customer interactions and, maybe, even their own business model. Emerging Countries (in particular BRIC) are evolving rapidly from just Manufacturing to Design and are investing heavily in infrastructure. This impacts within their economy, but also is a focus for ‘first world’ economy firms targeting growth.
Amar Hanspal (SVP Platform Solutions and Emerging Business) talked about Democratising Design and coined a new, to me at least, acronym. He described how CAD — Computer Aided Design — has evolved into CCAD: Computer + Cloud Aided Design. The cloud is enabling design data to follow designers from desktop to mobile, connecting designers and clients, sharing design data & intent for little cost. Infinite Computing is making live render & simulation a realistic option, not a dream. The future is now as Autodesk Cloud Applications (including iOS & Android apps) already get 1,000,000+ visitors per day. - Brian Mathews (VP Autodesk Labs), as usual, presented a vast array of potential technologies which will change the design, manufacturing and commercial landscape. His presentation “Confluence of disruption” used a music Rip, mix, burn analogy but applied it to atoms and manufactured goods. It will get a post of its own but ranged from Nano to Global scale design, reality capture and 3D printing from DNA to building scale!
Carl Bass (President & CEO) stopped by for a Q&A, discussions ranging from Cloud implications to business issues and more.
I then went on to the AEC Q&A (a manufacturing one ran at the same time) and finished the day at the Media/Blogger mixer. It was great to catch up with fellow bloggers from around the world, and a few US based ones too, before heading back to write this.
It stops now because I have to be up for the 8:00am main stage. I hear the mega-screen (which is 100’something feet wide) even makes PowerPoint look awesome!
(I’m posting more images to my Autodesk University 2011 Flickr Set)
