Autodesk design solutions linked to net

By ADAM GIFFORD

For Carol Bartz, the epiphany came two years ago when she saw the way her young daughter was responding to the internet.

"I realised it was going to change the way I got information," says Ms Bartz, chairman, chief executive and president of drawing software giant Autodesk.

"I became almost maniacal. My staff became sick of me saying, 'Web, web, web'."

Autodesk chief technical officer Scott Borduin says his realisation that the internet changed everything came after completing work on Autodesk Inventor, a ground-breaking 3D mechanical engineering design product described by some in the organisation as "the last great C++ application."

"I was asked to look at product data management and that led me to look at business to business commerce," Mr Borduin says.

"After two weeks looking, I went back and said the game has changed, the whole world is different, we have a completely different role to play and we really have to get on the ball.

"Shortly after I was made chief technical officer and started going around with Carol visiting market groups."

He says Ms Bartz's evangelical fervour was what was needed to move a company as large as Autodesk, which has more than 3000 staff and revenues last year of US$820 million ($1.92 billion).

"She had to push people to change their minds, or this wasn't going to happen. When I look at companies still lagging behind, I see it really does take top down recognition and pressure."

Now it is taken for granted at Autodesk that the company's goal is to lead design to the internet.

The discussions are about how to build software to do that, how to sell it, which markets to be in.

Ms Bartz was in part driven by anger at the hype surrounding dot com pure internet firms which supposedly would sweep aside the "big dumb companies."

"We've been passionate about this market for 18 years. My engineers and marketing people and sales people, they worry about engineers and architects and designers. So if some 25-year-old was going to come and say, 'I can do this better' - now wait a minute."

While much of the work making Autodesk products for the internet is being done at the company's headquarters in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and at 16 research centres around the world, Ms Bartz recognised not everything was going to be done in-house or through partnerships.

To explore new opportunities and new ways of working, Autodesk spun off two internet companies: Buzzsaw.com, which provides online project management capacity and other services to the building and construction industries; and RedSpark, which will provide services of value to manufacturers and engineers.

Buzzsaw.com went live last November and has been used to manage 17,000 projects.

RedSpark is due to launch later this year.

Autodesk also has a web portal (http://pointA.autodesk.com), which offers a centralised online community and resources for designers, engineers and architects.

Ms Bartz says the internet industry is full of companies saying they can do things without being able to deliver. That is because the technological challenges may be greater than people realise.

She says while Autodesk products such as AutoCAD, Inventor, geographic information systems like MapGuide, animation software like 3D Studio MAX and the special effects and 3D visualisation software from its Discreet subsidiary will always be computing intensive - "Intel loves us. We use a lot of processing power" - all solutions must now be linked to the web.

"To some extent, the web is now the application."

Mr Borduin says the internet allows the design process to be extended and to allow all the parties with a stake to communicate better in real time.

With an estimated 30 per cent of costs in any architectural project caused by waste because of bad information and communication, there is potential for big savings.

Take the process of doing the multitude of changes which come up during construction. Under the old model, the project supervisor would mark any alterations on the blueprint, put it in a tube and send it to the architect for approval. Days could be lost waiting for tubes to come back.

Now the architect can communicate with the site looking at the same plans at the same time over the internet. A two-day process is shrunk to two minutes.

Mr Borduin says there are big savings to be made in design processes.

"Design is the most important creative function in an organisation. For highly-engineered products, 80 per cent of the cost of production is determined by the end of the design phase. Time to market is also determined by then.

"Design is not just about look and function. It's decisions about procurement, decisions about assembly, decisions about materials.

"The web allows the designer to bring a lot more factors in to make design decisions, and to collaborate with others to make those decisions."

* Adam Gifford visited San Rafael as a guest of Autodesk.