Quick notes from Autodesk University

If you follow my twitter feed (@monica_schnitge), you’ll know that I’m one of 9,000 attending the 2011 edition of Autodesk University in Las Vegas. Days are crammed, so this has to be brief, but there’s a lot going on:

• Autodesk formally entered the PLM fray, after teasing about it for several months.Autodesk 360 for PLM is a combination of existing Vault (on-premise data management) and Buzzsaw (collaboration) and the new Nexus, a new, cloud-based set of Software as a Service (SaaS) apps for everything from compliance to RFQs. Many details (including pricing) are yet to come. I will write more about the offering and my impressions but Autodesk has a website dedicated to the launch at autodesk.com/everythingchanges. Every customer I spoke with after the unveiling is excited to get involved in late Beta testing.

• The company also today announced that it intends to acquire Horizontal Systems, a provider of cloud-based BIM collaboration solutions. I am not familiar with Horizontal, so need to learn more, but the press release says that “Horizontal Systems technology will be an important contributor to the Autodesk 360 for BIM vision for collaboration, data and lifecycle management … The acquisition of Horizontal Systems will help accelerate the movement of BIM to the cloud by providing users with the ability to more easily access and coordinate multi-discipline project data wherever and whenever it is needed throughout the entire project lifecycle.” The deal is expected to close by the end of January 2012. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but I’m guessing it’s another of the small technology buys Autodesk has been making lately.

• Makers rule. Many of the examples cited during yesterday’s keynotes were individuals doing very quickly what many enterprises can’t: bringing products from idea to market in a startlingly short time because of advances in everything from sketching tools to CAE to rapid prototyping. Very impressive but I hope that the message isn’t too one-sided: just because you work in a large company, don’t think you can’t innovate, too. The tools work just as well for you — you need to teach your organization to be more adaptive.

Much more soon — already late for the next meeting.