Autodesk University 2008: Special Report
Published Wed 11 Feb 2009
As customer events go, nothing is bigger in the CAD calendar than Autodesk’s yearly University in Las Vegas.
While we get to many CAD companies’ customer events, nothing can really prepare you for Autodesk University (AU) in Las Vegas. The sheer number of attendees and the breadth of industries represented dwarfs all other software developer shows. The main auditorium alone could house several jumbo jets and the number of training sessions, meetings, interest groups and social events available makes for a daily logistical challenge to try and see all the cool stuff on show during the four days.
For the last few years, AU has been held in the conference centre at the plush Venetian hotel. The building embodies an American interpretation of Venice, complete with St. Mark’s Tower, Bridge of Sighs, an ‘indoor’ St Mark’s Square and did I mention it has manned Gondolas and actual shop-lined canals on the second floor?! A wonder of modern engineering and very ‘Disney-for-adults’.
Over the last ten years, Autodesk has gone from being a big 2D CAD company with one product (AutoCAD) to a multi-industry dominating, multi-product giant and there’s nowhere better to feel the company’s velocity and breadth than at AU. This event is the destination to hear the official corporate view, to get inspired, to get trained and see technology that’s in development or about to be released. Autodesk has traditionally run a yearly update cycle for its products with March/April being the usual release date. AU’s December slot means that most products are in beta and builds are demonstrated, but rarely on stage. It’s worth noting that last year Autodesk also ran an AU in China, showing its commitment to that market.
If you attend AU you can expect to go to a number of general keynote sessions and self-selected industry-specific sessions on various tracks (manufacturing, building, visualisation, geo etc.), where you will receive lots of hands-on training. There’s a massive exhibition where you can meet the third-party development community, that creates loads of add-ons or hardware designed to enhance your Autodesk investment. There’s also a great section featuring products that were manufactured by customers using Autodesk software. This year Autodesk Labs had a display area showing future technology.
After your day is done there’s usually a number of simultaneous ‘beer bust’ parties each evening, which are industry-specific. Other entertainment laid on includes a Pecha Kucha night, where presenters are allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds, giving six minutes 40 seconds for presentations on a diverse range of topics, before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise and the interest level up. This has become a regular favourite. If you are wondering, Pecha Kucha is Japanese for the sound of conversation.
Keynote presentations
The first morning everyone heads to the cavernous main stage hall and is ushered into the appropriate seating block. This year the stage and screens were configured as a long thin walkway, surrounded 360 degrees by the audience. The main presentations were given by Autodesk’s CEO (Chief Technology Officer) Carl Bass, the company’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer)Jeff Kowalski and guest presenter Tom Kelley, founder and general manager of the famous product design company, IDEO.
What Autodesk people say on stage is important. In the past, Autodesk has been guarded about what technology it was developing, rarely seemed innovative and rushed incomplete products to market. However Autodesk did have a very successful and robust business model and channel, albeit that it had undergone a slow evolution from a one product company to industry divisions under previous CEO, Carol Bartz (who has recently joined Yahoo as CEO). 
The first speaker, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, is fundamentally a technologist and there seems to have been an explosion of software development, with open beta programs, technology and company acquisitions, resulting in many new and cool products for dealers to sell. At AU this year, it’s clear this trend is continuing, with yet more hot technology on show. While in the past, Autodesk employees would admit that Autodesk is rarely first to market and commonly had to repeat the excuse ‘we will get it right in the end’, Autodesk is now undoubtedly an innovator and driven to compete. While as a customer, you still have to put up with the much resented ‘obit’ program of existing releases, it’s now more obvious that some of these billions in revenues are being used for R&D than merely building shareholder value.
While I say Autodesk is more open and willing to show new products, it has a habit of hiding these in the keynotes. Rather than saying ‘hey look at this’, examples are projected onto the screens, mixing existing product capability with forthcoming technology or ‘canned’ demo ideas. Usually it’s only from knowing what the products can do that you can have an inkling of which bits are the cool new stuff. It’s not unlike solving a Sudoku puzzle. It always makes AU keynotes a bit fun. This year’s certainly didn’t fail to impress with a lot of new technology on display.
With the credit crunch in everyone’s mind, Carl Bass looked at how customers can stay competitive by keeping an innovative mindset and embracing sustainable design methodologies, highlighting initiatives that Autodesk is undertaking to build green tech into its analysis products. Bass also talked about how real customers from across the design spectrum were using CAD tools to design, model and detail their products in the digital environment before building prototypes, experiencing them before they are real. The stage was full of really fascinating models of customers’ work, covering all the markets that Autodesk plays in, from car design to architecture.
I remember the days when the big news at AU was that 2D CAD is moving from DOS to Windows! My, how things have changed! The move to 3D and virtual prototyping means that projects are produced and analysed with computers before anything is detailed or material cut. From small electronic devices like phones to entire cityscapes, CAD tools are really in a different league, offering analysis, simulation and built-in industry knowledge.
Jeff Kowalski really picked up this point and talked about the future of design innovation, giving us glimpses of what’s in Autodesk’s Labs, together with some way off predictions. It was at this point that a very interesting product momentarily appeared on the screens - a highly intuitive modelling tool that didn’t have much of an interface and seemed more powerful than Autodesk Inventor, having direct modelling capabilities like some of Autodesk’s competitors’ CAD applications. It became our mission to find out more about this un-named product! Was this radical interface the next release of Inventor?
Then Kowalski went quickly on to show a 3D sketching application that looked totally amazing and was obviously based on Alias technology, which is typically used for automotive and product styling. Next followed a ‘cloud computing’ rendering solution for kitchen interiors that’s being trialled and Kowalski then went onto talk about the abundance of computing cores that aren’t being used. In the future expect your CAD software to be guessing what you will want to do next and may well be doing it in the background at no cost to your modelling performance. For example, as your design changes, Inventor could be automatically performing a rendering operation and an FEA calculation, instantly ready for your next command, relevant to the geometry selected. 
The finale of Kowalski’s keynote was the introduction of a complete full-scale chopper motorcycle that had been rapid prototyped using Fused Deposition modelling (FDM) in the latest Stratasys machines. At the same time Autodesk announced the ability to send out jobs for prototyping from within AutoCAD via a web service. Although 3D printing a whole motorcycle at full scale would set you back in excess of $70,000!
It didn’t take too long after the main session to hear the name of this new Inventor-like technology. It’s called Inventor Fusion and there’s a slick teaser website (www.inventorfusion.com) with videos. While Inventor is used predominantly for mechanical design, it has also seen some interest from architects and structural engineers for its ability to model freely. The interface is very ‘heads-up’ design, with all commands being centred on the mouse for direct manipulation, with ‘what if’ scenarios, irrespective of feature order, dependencies or the CAD system it was originated in. This is Autodesk innovating in the area of user interface, while keeping pace with the industry-wide direct modelling movement being driven by some of its competitors.
Building analysis
There’s always a buzz at AU about the forthcoming releases and this year was no different. By the time you read this, the new versions of Revit, AutoCAD Architecture, Civil and Plant will all have been announced, shipping late March. The two show stopping products were Ecotect and Project Newport. Ecotect is Autodesk’s recent analysis acquisition and it’s a very visual and easy to use solution. In its previous life it had little marketing, so only a small number of companies were in the know. After a mainstage presentation it certainly set tongues wagging. Newport looks to be a stunning visualisation tool which will be an Autodesk Labs download soon. Newport will be the ultimate presentation tool, enabling big projects files to be rendered and navigated through in real time.
AutoCAD
On the rumour mill, we heard that the next release of AutoCAD was going to have some incredible 3D capabilities added to it, and this has now been confirmed with the official 2010 announcement. There had been a short, but painful, debate internally as to if or why AutoCAD should not get some of these advanced modelling capabilities like parametrics and direct modelling. Autodesk’s concentration on trying to get everybody to a vertical application is now to take more of a back seat, with Autodesk realising that AutoCAD is, and always will be, popular. This is not going to go away anytime soon and therefore should not be limited by the ambitions of its vertical divisions.
It will be fascinating to see how AutoCAD’s new found modelling and constraints system will differentiate it from products like Inventor (and Revit, on the architectural side). It’s now been confirmed that the constraints system in AutoCAD 2010 is different to Inventor’s and Revit’s, giving rise to another technology that has to be managed in the growing integration story that Autodesk is working on across its products.
Subscription
The initial Subscription offering from Autodesk was very much a ‘get something out there’ kind of affair. Autodesk is now committed to improving what customers get for their money and making it a lot more than just paying for the next release. Some of the improvements have already been implemented, with product groups like AutoCAD streaming additional functionality throughout the year. Autodesk’s Architecture, Engineering and Construction Division has recently started this practice too and it’s to become the norm, not the exception to most Autodesk subscription products. Autodesk is also keen to make upgrades downloadable, on demand. This speeds up the upgrade process and is also ‘green’, not having to manufacture tens of thousands of DVDs.
Expect to see more benefits to being on Subscription coming this year.
Conclusion
AU this year was really exciting, with lots of new technology to see. It’s obvious that Autodesk has been developing these new ideas for considerable periods of time and now felt confident to give attendees an insight into the kinds of technologies that it was looking to release at some point in the future. On this front Autodesk is very much a changed company.
For so many years no product was shown that couldn’t be bought and new technology was kept top secret. There’s certainly a new level of openness under CEO Carl Bass, one which engages customers on a broad level to see how these embryonic tools would be used. Autodesk has historically been accused of delivering incomplete first versions of products. The Autodesk Labs website and the offering of free downloads now means that this can be avoided.
Over 200 Northern European customers attended AU this year, which I believe is a record. For companies that rely heavily on Autodesk design software, it’s a great event to attend for many reasons. Our number one reason for attending would be to meet the people that actually program, strategise and market the products that you use. Autodesk is a global company but major decisions are still made in America. By sharing your experiences of the products with the Autodesk teams, it is possible to impact the development and to build relationships.
