Web seen as make or break for larger designers

By ADAM GIFFORD

Medium-sized and large architecture and design firms which do not embrace the web as a way of doing business will be out of business within a few years.

That prediction comes from Carol Bartz, president and chief executive of Autodesk, the market leader in computer-aided design software.

Bigger architecture firms moved to CAD (computer-aided design) plans several years ago, and even small firms are now finding that they cannot get work if they do not present computer-generated plans.

"If the big firms are not doing online hosted collaboration three years from now, they won't get work," Ms Bartz said.

One reason is efficiency. Already Autodesk customers using the new generation AutoCAD 2002 product to design their projects and manage them over the internet are reporting 30 per cent reductions in product development schedules.

"You have to have a secure place to transact something as complicated as building a commercial building. About 30 per cent of the cost of a building project comes from people having the wrong information," she said.

"If you can host all the information in one place, everyone involved in the project can pull things down when they need them and know they have all the right stuff."

As well as rebuilding its software to make it possible to collaborate over the internet, Autodesk spun off a separate company, Buzzsaw.com, to test if there was a market for online hosted construction services.

While most of the other 270 construction portals failed, Buzzsaw.com thrived, with 30,000 projects hosted and 130,000 users.

Autodesk has just bought back the 60 per cent of shares it did not own to bring the company back in house.

"Buzzsaw will be breaking even in another couple of quarters. We wrote off 40 per cent of costs, so it's earning positive for us," Ms Bartz said.

Another spin-off, Red Spark, which was attempting to provide a portal for preproduction sourcing of design materials, was shut down last month.

Red Spark was launched too late to benefit from the venture capital flowing into the dotcom boom, and was hit by the slowdown in the United States manufacturing industry.

Ms Bartz's ability to think outside the corporate square during her nine years in charge of Autodesk this year won her the Ernst & Young Master Entrepreneur of the Year award.

She said chief executives must be entrepreneurial if their companies were to survive in a period of rapid change.

When the internet started becoming a mainstream business tool, Ms Bartz saw a future for Autodesk in the data its customers generated.

"What our customers do is create complex designs, then put them on paper, because the rest of the process is paper-based.

"In the US alone Federal Express makes $500 million a year shipping rolls of drawings about.

"The internet and technologies like XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) allowed us to paint the vision of keeping all this design information in the system digital, so the 10 people who need to use it can do so more effectively in a richer way and it can be controlled better."

As well as running Autodesk, Ms Bartz serves on the boards of Cisco, BEA Systems, Network Appliances, and VA Linux.

"It's an information-rich world. I don't know how I got information before - I must not have.

"Just being able to go to the web and do a quick search has changed the way we as individuals and businesses work."