Autodesk evolves its business model to suit current market trends
Keeping up and updating technologies are paramount to any business, according to Autodesk worldwide sales and services senior vice-president, Steven Blum, and the company is doing just that to evolve and keep up with trends in the market.
Blum said the software company has recently been on the move towards the Cloud computing space. Autodesk recently moved from selling perpetual licenses to having a subscription model, with sales of individual perpetual licenses to its offerings ending the end of January and the sale of perpetual license suites to end at the end of July.
“It’s moving from desktop to Cloud computing and we’ve been developing more Cloud based offerings to help our clients best leverage the amount of compute power that’s in the Cloud. It also enables mobility, so we continue to evolve our business models towards having one that is consumption-based,” he said.
“So, we’ll be in a fully subscription-only model and it’s a multi-year journey.”
Blum said going into 2016, the company will continue rolling out more Cloud-based offerings and driving them to scale.
“This is a multi-year journey that our customers are going on, where they are going to need to deal with disruptions in their businesses that will require them to think about how they produce their offerings in a different way. So, we’re spending a lot of time in that area and will be core to us in 2016,” he said.
Strong play in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), manufacturing, and media and entertainment verticals, but with industries blending, it’s creating significant challenges for businesses which become opportunities when they leverage technology to take advantage of it.
“They all require data management, and data analytics. Our focus is on enabling our clients to design a better world and we provide them with the necessary tools to be able to capture a complete design, simulate and evaluate it, before committing to it.
“As the Cloud becomes more impactful, there are so much more challenges that customers will have to deal with and the overlaps are creating new ways of getting things done effectively,” Blum mentioned.
Autodesk Asia-Pacific senior vice-president, Patrick Williams, said the Asia-Pacific market has been responsive towards the move to Cloud.
“It’s been a very significant part of our overall Asia-Pacific business. We have seen continued adoption of the technology and our partners have been supporting us through it. Our Australian partners are some of the most tech-savvy and that’s leading growth in this country,” he said.
Moving forward, the IoT will be a trend the company intends to increase its focus on.
“We’ve been adding capabilities there because ultimately, we see the value of IoT being what it enables. This is what we believe is going to really change manufacturing in general. We see Cloud as an enabler of this.
“There’s going to be a lot of services that need to be built around this, so our partners are going to need to deliver many of the services that will enable these for customers. It’s going to be a big opportunity for them to sell Cloud-based offerings and then to add value around those offerings by delivering services,” he added.
