Last week, Autodesk reported financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2014. Yes, that’s right, 2014. Although I’ve had this funky financial calendar explained to me, I still don’t quite get it. It’s sort of like cars that are introduced in January 2013, but they are 2014 models.
Anyway, Autodesk had some pretty mixed financial results company-wide for the quarter.
Carl Bass, Autodesk’s president and CEO said, “Our second quarter was marked by strength in our Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) business segment and continued growth in suites”. “Growth in these vital areas was offset by mixed contributions from other parts of the business. On the product side, we strengthened and expanded our leading product portfolio with new desktop, cloud and mobile offerings.”
What we take that to mean is AEC is doing well, but other major market segments, such as mechanical is doing OK, while media/entertainment continues to go down, with no prospect for real improvement in these segments anytime soon.
For example, revenue from the AEC business segment increased 9 percent to $177 million compared to the second quarter last year. On the other hand, revenue from the Manufacturing business segment increased just 2 percent to $144 million compared to the second quarter last year. Finally, revenue from the Media and Entertainment business segment decreased 11 percent to $43 million compared to the second quarter last year. Ouch on the last one.
For flagship products (such as standalone AutoCAD), revenue decreased 11 percent to $289 million compared to the second quarter last year, while revenue from suites increased 18 percent to $193 million. Suites are sweet for Autodesk.
For something a little more inspiring, check out the following video that shows some interesting “Behind the scenes” 3D printing news from Autodesk’s perspective.
Now back to Autodesk financial results . . .
Looking ahead to the future, Mark Hawkins, Autodesk executive vice president and CFO said, “With the recent introduction of more flexible license and service offerings that have ratable revenue streams, such as cloud-based and rental license offerings, Autodesk’s business model is evolving. We are currently refining our plans around the pace and time frame for this business model transition”
Admittedly, with the way Autodesk has changed internally, what it offers, and the way it offers its products, these results are not all that bad. The company is into a lot of things for the long haul, such as low-priced, cloud-based apps and subscription software that do not now and may never contribute greatly to the bottom line. Of course, this can’t go on forever, but the company has shown a higher degree of patience than in the past – good for customers, not so good for investors.
For many reasons, and these financial results notwithstanding, Autodesk fully acknowledges that it cannot afford to slip into any state of complacency or stagnation. The company has gambled on a number of technologies for “creators” through in-house development, as well as acquisitions. Autodesk seems to be financially willing and able to continue down this path, realizing that there will be some winners and some losers. In the end, though, Autodesk will have to remain at the forefront of innovation if it wants to maintain the status and stature it has in the many market segments it serves.
After several months in Beta, Autodesk today officially and commercially released Fusion 360 (formerly known as Inventor Fusion) — the newest member of Autodesk’s growing cloud-based products/services family.
Essentially, Fusion 360 is a conceptual design tool. I liken it to a relatively simple modeling tool where CAD meets social media for collaborative design. As an industrial designer myself, I was especially interested in what Fusion 360 could do as a conceptual design tool, so I signed up for the Beta program and had some hands-on time with it.
Check out the Fusion 360 overview video to get an idea of what it’s all about:
Fusion 360’s interface is pretty basic, so it doesn’t take long to start creating some shapes and forms. Keep in mind that a lot of 3D form creation is based on T-Splines technology (that Autodesk acquired), so it’s different than Inventor’s method.
For conceptual design, you’ll probably spend the majority of your time in the Sculpt (for creating organic forms) or Model (for creating solid geometry forms) workspaces. For repairing imported surfaces, you’ll use the Patch workspace.
At least initially, a slightly different mindset is required for using Fusion 360 because it is based on a hub-and-group premise. At the center is your personal hub, where you can create and participate in groups, and post items to, and monitor them. Each hub and group has a similar set of tabbed pages with areas called tiles that contain related information and tools.
As of today, Fusion 360 is commercially available and is free of charge for the next 90 days. After that it will set you back $25 per user per month with an annual contract commitment. So, for $300 a year you get a fairly capable conceptual design tool that I feel can fit into many collaborative product design workflows, as shown in the following video:
There’s a lot to learn and cover in Autodesk Fusion 360, and in the coming weeks, I’ll take you through some different design workflows that involve interacting with others — importing data, creating different types of models, refining designs, exporting design data to other CAD applications for other purposes, collaboration, etc. In other words, what you can realistically expect to do with Autodesk Fusion 360.
OK, so Autodesk Fusion 360 is just outta Beta, but is ready for prime time? With some reservations, I would say yes, no, and maybe. How’s that for commitment? I think it all depends on what your expectations are and how hard you want to push it. Admittedly, it’s come a long way, but in my opinion, still has some maturing to do before I’d truly consider it production-ready for sophisticated design purposes.
I like the potential of cloud-based applications, but like Adobe’s Creative Suite, I’m still coming to grips with the perception of data integrity and vulnerability, as well as a perpetual monthly fee. I guess, like many new users of cloud-based applications, I just have to get used to the inevitability of this brave new world. That said, though, with Version 1.0, Fusion 360 does have some limitations, but its potential is tremendous.
Over the weekend we learned that Autodesk had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tinkercad, a browser-based 3D design tool/service that is relatively easy to use. The addition of Tinkercad makes a lot of sense for Autodesk and will further broaden its 123D family of apps. The acquisition will also rescue Tinkercad and its user community, despite a previously announced June 2013 shutdown by its founders.
“We are excited to have reached an agreement with Autodesk that will provide a solid home and bright future for Tinkercad,” said Kai Backman, founder and CEO of Tinkercad. “We found in Autodesk a shared vision for empowering students, makers and designers with accessible and easy to use software, and with their global reach and expertise in democratizing design, we’re confident in their ability to introduce Tinkercad to new audiences around the world.”
Introduction to 3D Modeling with Tinkercad
Autodesk said it intends for Tinkercad to remain available as part of its consumer portfolio. I assume this also includes Tinkercad’s four pricing tiers: $0-$499/month. The company also intends to incorporate elements of the Tinkercad technology and user experience into the Autodesk 123D family of products. The transaction is expected to close within the next 30 days, although (as usual) no financials were disclosed.
“Tinkercad is a natural extension of the Autodesk 123D family as well as our other apps and services for consumers, as it is already used alongside Autodesk products,” said Samir Hanna, Autodesk vice president, consumer products. “We look forward to welcoming the Tinkercad community to Autodesk and to continuing their mission of accessible 3D design for all.”
Summarizing the acquisition, Backman said, “Before signing the deal we spent a lot of time talking to Autodesk engineers and product people about their vision for Tinkercad. We were impressed by the deep insight the Autodesk team had into the Tinkercad interface and its underlying technology. There is also a strong alignment on topics like furthering education and the vision of making design more accessible. But most of all we are very excited about the roadmap Autodesk has drafted for Tinkercad.”
This acquisition is good news for Tinkercad principals and users, and should be a good addition to the Autodesk 123D portfolio and its users. The companies are also located less than a mile apart, so the commute won’t be too bad for either party during the transition period.
Even though we’re not even through the first quarter of 2013, some companies can’t wait for 2014. A case in point is Autodesk, who today announced in general terms its next generation desktop products and Autodesk 360 cloud-based services for 2014. In actuality, the cloud-based offerings augment the desktop application suites. All suite subscribers have access to select cloud services as part of their subscriptions, and can always purchase additional cloud access, if and when needed.
One of the most intriguing of the new cloud-based services is a point cloud engine for processing point clouds called ReCap. With it, you’ll be able to use laser scan and photographic image data to build 3D models. This is one I definitely want to try out for myself.
Autodesk’s Amar Hanspal acted as the MC for the product introductions and kicked things off with a new look logo and branding for the company — kind of origamic — that he said was a new identity that blended art and science.
As it has for the past couple of years, Autodesk prefers to market its products, not so much as discrete products, but multi-tiered suites (Standard, Premium, and Ultimate) with more comprehensive utility, function, and profit. The Autodesk product suites that we’ll pay the most attention to in the coming months will include:
AutoCAD Design Suite
Factory Design Suite
Product Design Suite
Without a lot of specifics to draw upon, several aspects of Autodesk’s 2014 product and service lineups look promising. However, the devil’s in the details of how all these parts work together, and that is exactly what we’ll be evaluating in the coming months.
Not just resting on its cash reserves or other recent acquisitions, Autodesk announced that it has completed the acquisition of Firehole Technologies (DBA Firehole Composites), a privately held company that specializes in design and analysis software for composite materials. Through this acquisition, Autodesk will expand its analysis software portfolio to work with light, strong, and complex composite materials. Firehole Composites is based in Laramie, Wyoming, also the home of the University of Wyoming, and a town with an incredibly low unemployment rate of 3.4%.
“As manufacturers move to more complex material such as light weight composites, new simulation technology is required to predict and optimize the performance of these materials. This acquisition will enable Autodesk to deliver this technology to a broad spectrum of design and engineering industries,” said Buzz Kross, senior vice president for Design, Lifecycle and Simulation products. “The Firehole team will add significant expertise in next generation materials and non-linear analysis, as well as industry-leading technologies that strongly complement our solutions for structural, thermal and plastics analysis.”
Engineered composites are complex materials made from two or more materials with widely different physical and/or chemical properties. When combined, the constituents produce a material with characteristics much different than the individual components. Interestingly, though, (and this adds to the mystique behind composites), the individual components remain separate and distinct within the finished structure. Even though it’s been around a long time, today, still the most common composite material is concrete. Because composites are complex materials, simulating and analyzing them and their behavior is a very computationally demanding proposition.
Check out the video for CompositePro for FEA that demonstrates some of the tools availble to support composite finite element analysis process. Among other things, CompositePro can be used to:
Determine ply-level or laminate-level material properties for 2D shell or 3D solid element analyses
Investigate complex failure modes of stuctures such as tubes or sandwich panels to understand when they will fail
Autodesk says it intends to sell and support the existing Firehole Composites product line, as well as integrating the composites analysis technology more tightly with Autodesk products. No surprise there, especially the latter. As usual, and not unexpectedly, terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
OK, it’s almost spring and our minds turn to robots, as in the FIRST competition for middle and high school students and started by Dean Kamen several years ago. However, another branch of cool robotics for young people, as well as older guys like me, is LEGO MINDSTORMS.
We learned that Autodesk has partnered with The LEGO Group to provide 3D interactive building instructions for LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, a new platform designed to introduce a younger generation to building and programming robots.
Accessible through a mobile app for iOS and Android devices, or over the web at MINDSTORMS.COM, the interactive building instructions—based on Autodesk Inventor Publisher technology—will provide an alternative to traditional 2D paper or online instructions. The 3D building instruction will let LEGO MINDSTORMS builders digitally view how the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 components fit together, making it easier to build some pretty sophisticated robots.
When building a LEGO MINDSTORMS robot you’ll be able to stop the animation, zoom in on a part or rotate it to see exactly how parts need to be fitted together. Additional features geared toward providing a positive experience for LEGO builders include double-tapping a part for component information, and a Map feature that will let you see exactly which part of the model is being worked on.
In case you’re not familiar, in addition to LEGO’s famous bricks, the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 set contains a multitude of parts—including motors, infrared sensors and a programmable microcomputer— for creating robots that walk, move or take whatever action they’re programmed to do. LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 will include the 3D interactive building instructions for five different robots.
The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 set, as well as the 3D building instruction mobile apps and web instructions, will be available in the second half of 2013.
All in all, pretty cool stuff, and something I personally am looking forward to playing working with when it comes available because robots are a big part of the future of engineering and engineers.
This morning, Autodesk presented and launched Autodesk PLM 360 (fomerly known as code name Nexus at Autodesk University).
Participating in today’s presentation and launch were:
Brenda Discher, Vice President, Manufacturing Strategy & Industry Marketing
Buzz Kross, Senior Vice President, Design, Lifecycle & Simulation (new title?)
Steve Bodnar, Vice President, Data Management
The underlying themes for the presentation were “PLM for Everyone” and “Always On.” The presenters consistently stressed that Autodesk PLM 360 is more than just file sharing. It was made clear that PDM (on premise with Autodesk Vault) is for the design department, whereas PLM (PLM 360 and the cloud) is for the enterprise by providing crowdsource capabilities for sharing data and supporting business processes. It was made clear, though, that you do not need vault to use PLM 360 — it will work with any PDM system.
The phrase that kept coming up throughout the presentation was that Autodesk PLM 360 is, “Insanely Configurable.” That borrows pretty heavily from the late Steve Jobs’s product introductions at Apple, and I’m not so sure that PLM 360 is in that league, but time will tell. The fact that it is customer configurable, however, is noteworthy in and of itself. It was also said that no beta user took more than three days to get PLM 360 up and running. No details here, but that’s easy to follow-up on and confirm.
Autodesk claims that its PLM 360 will completely change the PLM landscape, primarily because it costs a fraction (10%) of legacy systems, and requires no special hardware, consultants, or programmers for implementation. Of course, this needs to be proven, but those are pretty heady claims when compared with the competition.
Even though it admits it’s entering the PLM market late, Autodesk is hoping to take advantage of current PLM customers who are dissatisfied with what they have. The company also is claiming that, “The cloud is the perfect technology for PLM” and “If you can use a browser, you can use Autodesk PLM 360.”
As far as pricing goes for PLM 360, the first 3 users are free for all access, and this will resonate well with really small businesses. Additional regular users are $75/month/user. What Autodesk calls participants (casual users) are $25/month/user — although it’s a little unclear what distinguishes a participant over a regular user.
Regardless of price, security has historically been one of the biggest barriers to wider PLM acceptance. Autodesk assured us that that piece has been thoroughly addressed, as well as data backup, and disaster recovery. All good things.
Autodesk PLM 360 is available now and cocnsists of ~140 apps (modules for specific functions?). According to Autodesk, it spent a lot of time and effort maximizing the user experience and minimizing the learning curve. Kross said, “The user experience is key, because the UI for most software [including PLM] has not really progressed since 2000.” I’ll agree there.
When asked what distinguishes Autodesk PLM 360 and other competitive cloud offerings, Kross responded, “Ours is real and we are in the market.”
So, will Autodesk PLM 360 fulfill the promise of “PLM for everyone?” Will it be where business apps meet social apps for social PLM? That’s hard to say at this early stage, but it seems like Autodesk has a lot of the pieces in place. I’ll reserve judgement, though, until I actually experience PLM 360 hands-on myself.
One of the biggest trends we have witnessed in the MCAD market for 2011 has been the number and magnitude of PLM industry acquisition transactions and the possible short- and long-term consequences. It seemed as though in some weeks we received at least one announcement from a major MCAD/PLM player acquiring either another company i its entirety or at least a piece of its PLM-related technology. Although nothing really new, the acquisition train really seemed to pick up steam this year compared to the recent past.
While a lot of technologies were grown organically from the inside of the major MCAD vendors, Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, and PTC also all made significant external acquisitions this year that will diversify and strengthen their offerings. Notably absent in the flurry of acquisitions was Siemens PLM software, although the parent company did do some acquiring in other divisions of the company.
The acquisition mix included everything from CAE, to ECAD, to software lifecycle development management, and a a number of technologies that are a little more esoteric.
Will any one of these acquisitions cause huge changes in the PLM market generally? For the most part, no, but they do point to the fact that the MCAD/PLM market continues to evolve and consolidate. However, the current acquisition/consolidation cycle might have significant impact on users who either already use one of the Autodesk, Dassault, or PTC PLM sets or are are in the process of selecting a PLM set for the first time.
We see no sign of the acquisition train slowing down anytime soon. We actually see the momentum picking up as the major vendors, relatively flush with cash, acquire smaller companies that have technologies that complement their existing product sets.
Though the PLM market continues to consolidate through acquisition, it will never completely consolidate for two reasons:
New independent PLM companies will continue to start up and evolve while developing new technologies.
A lot of independent PLM software development companies (and their customers) are satisfied being independent and want to keep it that way.
There is plenty of room in the PLM space for both camps to co-exist – industry consolidation thorough acquisition and remaining independent. The big boys can continue to expand their PLM sets and the independent software vendors can continue to do and focus on what they do best. Overall, the co-existence diversifies, stabilizes, and moves the PLM market forward while benefiting both vendors and customers.
