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Autodesk

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Autodesk, Inc.
Company typePublic (Nasdaq: ADSK)
IndustryCAD/CAM Software [1]
FoundedMill Valley, California, USA (1982)
HeadquartersSan Rafael, California, USA
Key people
John Walker, Founder
Carol Bartz, Executive Chairman
Carl Bass, President and CEO
ProductsSee complete products listing.
RevenueIncrease $1.840 billion USD (FY 2007)
Increase $289.7 million USD (FY 2007)
Number of employees
5,169 (FY 2007)
Websitewww.autodesk.com

Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSK), a Fortune 1000 company, is a software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, media and entertainment, and wireless data services fields. Autodesk was founded by John Walker and twelve other co-founders in 1982. Over its history, it has had various locations in Marin County, California, USA. It is currently headquartered in San Rafael, California.

Organization

Autodesk is divided into four industry-specific business divisions: Manufacturing Solutions (MSD), the Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC), the Media and Entertainment Division (M&E), and Platform Solutions & Emerging Business (PSEB), which includes geospatial and plant solutions, content and search, and extended design as well as Autodesk Labs. Autodesk also has a services group, Autodesk Consulting, and the Location Based Services Division (LBS).

Portfolio

The principal product offerings from the Media and Entertainment Division are Maya, 3ds max, Discreet Inferno, Discreet Flame, Discreet Fire, Discreet Flint, Discreet Smoke, Toxik and Lustre. These Academy Award winning products are covered on a dedicated page for the Media and Entertainment Division.

A screenshot of AutoCAD, Autodesk's flagship product.

The Platform Technology Division develops and manages Autodesk's flagship product, AutoCAD, and AutoCAD LT.

The Manufacturing Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Inventor Series, Autodesk Inventor Professional, AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Vault.

The Infrastructure Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Map 3D, Autodesk Land Desktop, Autodesk Civil3D, Autodesk MapGuide, MapGuide Enterprise and the line of Topobase products.

The Building Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk AutoCAD Architectural (Old name - Architectural Desktop), Autodesk Building Systems, Autodesk Revit Architectural (Old name - Revit Building), Autodesk Revit Structure, and Autodesk Revit Systems

Other products include Autosketch, Autodesk Subscription Program and Autodesk LocationLogic.

Discontinued Products

From time to time Autodesk discontinues some of the products in their portfolio. Some of Autodesk's "retired" products are listed here:

  • Volo View was a web-enabled review and markup tool from Autodesk for engineering data, including support for Autodesk’s DWG, DXF, and DWF formats. Volo View enabled design teams to communicate ideas and review designs without access to AutoCAD software. Autodesk discontinued sales of Volo View on May 1, 2005. The latest version of the software, Volo View 3, worked with the following file formats: AutoCAD 2004, DWG and DXF; Design Web Format (DWF 6); Autodesk Inventor 7 IPT, IAM, and IDW and raster files. The functionality of this product is largely replaced by Autodesk Design Review. Autodesk has also released a free product called DWG TrueView. This product enables users to view and plot AutoCAD DWG and DXF files, and to publish these same files to the DWF file format.
  • Cyberspace by Autodesk was an early real time 3d environment capable of producing basic phong shaded walkthroughs of DXF format models in "realtime". No textures were supported, and the system appeared to support a maximum DXF model size of around 35kb. A popular demo model of the Parthenon in Greece was shown around the US in a tour of the portable demo system - complete with virtual reality goggles. on the September 30th, 2004 Autodesk announced that QuickCAD would be discontinued after version 8.

History

Autodesk's first notable product was AutoCAD, a CAD application designed to run on the systems known as "microcomputers" at the time, including those running the 8-bit CP/M operating system and two of the new 16-bit systems, the Victor 9000 and the IBM Personal Computer (PC). This CAD tool allowed users to create detailed technical drawings, and was affordable to many smaller design, engineering, and architecture companies.

In Release 2.1 they introduced a new concept in CAD and software industry: the open platform software, by means of the introduction of a built-in Lisp interpreter with a custom dialect of the Lisp Language: AutoLisp, customized to program built-in particular AutoCAD solutions. Furthermore, they also implemented a C subset of its own libraries and made it available to developers. This brought as a result the "evolutionary" growth of a large collection of minor software companies developing solutions for AutoCAD as the main platform.

Since Release 12, the company stopped supporting the Unix environment and the Apple Macintosh platform, and since Release 14 it discontinued the MS-DOS releases and worked closely together with Microsoft sharing its base technology to achieve superior performance in the Windows operating system.

AutoCAD is the de facto standard non-specialized CAD solution and its file formats DXF and DWG are the most common for CAD interchange. Since the late 1990's, the company made a concerted effort to provide a product for every solution in the industry.

In 2002, Autodesk purchased a related parametric modeling software called Revit[2], from Massachusetts-based Revit Technologies for $133 million. Revit, for the building solutions and infrastructure group and Inventor [3] for the manufacturing group, formed the foundation for future Autodesk products - a strong departure away from their 20-year old AutoCAD software code.

While there is no other single competitor of similar size in the design software industry, Autodesk's products compete against products from several smaller companies, including MicroStation, owned by Bentley Systems, VectorWorks from Nemetschek, ArchiCAD, owned by Graphisoft, SolidWorks, owned by Dassault Systemes, RoadEng, owned by Softree Technical Systems,12d Model, owned by 12d Solutions,Pro/E, owned by PTC, and SDS/2 owned by Design Data.

On October 4, 2005, Autodesk announced plans to acquire Alias in a cash acquisition valued at US$182 million. On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD.


See also

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