Autodesk Inc, a Nasdaq-listed company that develops architectural, engineering and entertainment software, is aiming at having between 100 million and 120 million users for its consumer applications (apps) globally in the next couple of years, according to Phil Bernstein, vice-president (building industry strategy and relations).
Autodesk currently has 12 million professional users, and 70 apps for the consumer segment, including games, drawing programmes and very-light-weight engineering applications, with a total user base of 85 million. Over the past 17 years, all winners of the Academy Award for 'Best Visual Effects in Film' used Autodesk solutions.
“We have started working on the consumer part of the industry since the last three years with an idea to democratise our technology even further. It is not a business that we are looking to generate a lot of revenues from but to raise awareness about the company. It, however, has grown much faster that we thought,” he told Business Standard on the sidelines of the international conference on green buildings held recently in Hyderabad.
The three-decade-old company, with global revenues of $2.2 billion, and cash and equivalents of $1.6 billion in FY12, had in July 2012 announced its intent to acquire social-video service Socialcam Inc for about $60 million to expand in the consumer markets.
Bernstein said that one of the things that the company was working towards now was to move many of its traditional desktop-based software apps to the cloud and make them more widely available.
“Our portfolio has almost 200 pieces of software. Right now, we are moving some apps (collaboration and analysis tools) onto the cloud. Our long-term strategy is to move everything. This, however, is not a trivial process. It requires redesigning, rethinking and rewriting,” he added.
According to Bernstein, a practicing architect for 20 years prior to joining Autodesk, and also a professor with the Yale School of Architecture, the company currently has 20 products that are used regularly in construction, mostly around understanding drawing, which it calls building information modelling and collaboration.
Stating that the adoption levels of Autodesk's solutions in the emerging markets, including India, are not as strongly as the company would have liked, he said the company believed that the only solution for the scale of the construction industry that is going to happen in the next 20 years in the emerging markets was to improve construction methodologies.
“The current growth that we are talking about now is about the 12 million houses and the 35 airports that are going to be built in India. My own opinion is that the Indian market is the one that is most likely to be in a leadership position in the rest of the emerging markets,” Bernstein said.
