Joel Orr's World

Autodesk CEO Carl Bass kicked off the day's presentations with an important new emphasis for the company: Sustainability. "'Paper or plastic?' may be the wrong question; why not bring your own reusable bag?" he pointed out. Carl and Buzz Kross gave examples of how Autodesk has initiated sustainability efforts within Autodesk, and even hired a "sustainability tsarina," Lynelle Preston Cameron.

The firm has also backed a PBS series, "e²: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious," that talks about sustainability and related technologies.

Two more user companies were on stage - Faurecia (an Euro 11b automotive company) and Renault. Both companies make extensive use of Autodesk products to produce virtual prototypes.

Future technologies: Here are three things Autodesk is working on, which will appear in some future release of their products:

• Integration of ProductStream with SharePoint. Autodesk has long been aligned with Microsoft. SharePoint is Microsoft's very popular collaboration environment - $1 billion/year, and the company's fastest-growing product. Many Autodesk customers are SharePoint users, so this makes sense. Looks like a nice implementation.
• Real-time ray tracing. Autodesk acquired the Swedish Opticor last year; their product is a scalable real-time ray-tracing solution. Ray tracing is the most sophisticated and realistic form of rendering, showing detail and realism not available through any other mechanism. But it is generally thought of as a batch task, taking hours on powerful computers. Thanks to new algorithms and faster computers, complex scenes can now be rendered in seconds. The software also scales well, with additional cores or processors reducing rendering time. Very impressive.
  
• A complete nich-oriented solution package for moldmaking, from sketching to machining of the final mold. Taking advantage of functional modeling capabilities, this package yields impressive time compression in model creation, mold generation, and more.

Finally, I asked Andrew Anagnost about Autodesk's "anti-PLM" stance. (CEO Carl Bass said famously in February, "I only know of three companies with a PLM problem - Dassault, UGS, and PTC." The implication was that PLM is a cure in search of a disease.) "When we talk to our customers, they tell us their challenges are at the workgroup level. So that is the focus of digital prototyping. PLM is a poorly defined 'global unification theory' approach that is simply not relevant to our customer base," he said.