Earlier today Amar Hanspal (SVP Autodesk) presented Autodesk’s 2014 suites to the world. The webcast only lasted for 40 mins and considering the depth and range of Autodesk’s suites it was a quick fire presentation with a high level view of this years new philosophy. In Amar’s opening statement one comment stood out for me:
“Today the proliferation of cloud & mobile technologies is dramatically changing, not just the way design is done, but also who is participating in this process.”
2 years ago Autodesk introduced Suites for the first time to accelerate the aid the implementation of digital prototyping. Last year Autodesk introduced Autodesk 360 to compliment the suite products and officially start introducing their customers to cloud technology. They’ve continued to build on this approach with this years release of suite products across all industries. This years story is familiar:
Suites & Cloud equals the most comprehensive industry workflows for digital prototyping, building information modelling, plant, factory, infrastructure design and digital entertainment creation.
In 2014 subscription customers have the benefit of leveraging the cloud tools, which are increasingly being developed to extend the desktop based suites. Amar went on to show that contrary to popular belief, customers want to use more products. Here are some of the facts he presented:
- Customers that use 3 or more products are 42% more satisfied than those only using 2.
- 72% of Autodesk customers are using 2 or more products in their suite.
- 54% of those customers are interested in using more over the next 18 months.
- 61% that use 3 products are interested in using even more.
- More use = more satisfaction = more products used.
Amar said that suites revenue is up 53% over the last year, showing by continuing to add value to all autodesk suites via growing products & services within the suites is the right path for Autodesk and its customers.
AutoCAD Design Suite
- The social design feed first seen in AutoCAD WS and Autodesk 360 is now available in the desktop applications.
- One click workflows between Showcase & Alias, enacted from directly within Alias.
Morgan Motors are using the AutoCAD design suite. Alias allows them to design ‘On The Fly’, some of the best ideas weren’t planned, they just appeared in Alias. They use showcase and the online configurator so customers can see what options they can buy & configure their own Morgan. Additionally they are able to use 3ds Max Design to create photo realistic imagery and animations for marketing purposes.
Building Design Suite
- Host of new design, analysis, construction and documentation capabilities
- New Cloud services
- The next generation of infrastructure modeller with Infraworks
- Energy Analysis with Green building studio
- Optimisation via Inventor
Entertainment Creation Suite
- Casual Social and Mobile gaming are having a huge impact on the industry
- 40 billion videos were watched on YouTube in the last year alone.
- Quality and effects are more relevant than ever before.
The development of the tools in the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite reflect this ever increasing shift to help small visual effect houses and game developers to seize these opportunities.
- Across the board power increases
- Automated Crowd Population
- Much improved user experience
Amar talked about how the Entertainment Creation Suite helped to create the upcoming game Beyond Two Souls from Quantic Dreams (the makers of Heavy Rain). He didn’t give away much about how they used it, but I now want to go and buy that game as soon as its out!
Factory Design Suite:
- 300 new assets available in the cloud
- Added support for Autodesk Revit model import
Plastics Research Corporation, manufacturer of shipping and storage containers for military assets, used Autodesk Factory Design Suite to design their expanding operation. This will enable them to make more of these types of pallets than any other manufacturer in the world. They selected their new factory layout using a design created by someone with no prior CAD experience, which was very brave of them, but also an incredible testament to its ease of use. I was happy to hear they are also using Autodesk Vault to manage all their design data.
Infrastructure Design Suite
- Introduction of the next generation Infrastructure modeller, Infraworks 360
- Revit Structure in the Premium suite
- Full set of Revit capability in the Ultimate suite.
Plant Design Suite
There are some big additions in this suite
- 3ds Max Design in the Premium edition
- Inventor Optimization in the Ultimate edition
Product Design Suite:
Host of new capabilities
- Inventor to Revit interoperability
- Assembly Joints to decrease the time it takes to build up assemblies
- Inventor Professional added to Premium.
- Naviswork Manage added to Ultimate.
Autodesk 360
- Suite subscribers still gain access to A360 family
- Users are leveraging Inventor Optimisation, Rendering then Storage & Collaboration.
Amar went onto share some customer quotes including one from our very own John Evans:
Here are some incredible statistics Amar wanted to share with the audience. It really is breath taking:
- 20 million Autodesk 360 accounts created
- 9 million in the last year
- 725,000 new accounts a month
- 2 million renderings with 1 million in the last quarter
- 11 millions downloads of AutoCAD WS & 2 million unique users a month
- 20 million files uploaded to AutoCAD WS
This shows customers are jumping at the chance to adopt cloud technology, supporting the fact that Autodesk are leading the way with Cloud tools and workflows in the CAD & visualization industry.
You can watch the webcast below:
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