The Hindu : Autodesk e-nables its design suite

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 28, 2002

Business

Business

Autodesk e-nables its design suite

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE NOV. 27. Exactly 20 years after it introduced, "AutoCAD,'' the world's first Computer-Aided Drafting and Design (CADD) tool, the parent company, AutoDesk, has launched new products aimed at Net-enabling its entire application suite.

Unveiling the new solutions — Streamline and Buzzsaw — for the Indian market today, Autodesk's regional director for South Asia Pacific, Andre Pravaz, explained that the launch was part of the company's strategy to help customers move design data beyond the drafting room — and to e-nable seamless collaboration at all stages in the life cycle of a product from concept to completion and deployment. Streamline was tailored for the manufacturing industry, while Buzzsaw would cut a clear path for collaboration in the construction sector.

Both new tools would mesh with Autodesk's digital design solutions — the flagship "AutoCAD,'' the 3-D manufacturing tool, "Inventor'', the architectural suite, "Revit'' as well as the full range of Autodesk's Geographic Information System (GIS) design tools, Mr. Pravaz added. The company was also promoting the Design Web Format (DWF) that is fast emerging as the de facto dynamic 3-D portable document standard for the construction industry. While the new web collaboration tools could be scaled to run on the customer's own local or wide area networks, Autodesk also offered today, to host the application on its own servers for small and medium sized players who did not want the hassle of operating their own nets.

Net-fuelled collaboration, according to Autodesk's Bangalore-based engineers, could be expected to save almost 30 per cent of the total product lifecycle management (PLM) costs in typical cases. In recent years Autodesk's design tool deployments have moved beyond hard core engineering and manufacturing applications, to include such computation-intensive tasks as games console development, 2-D and 3-D animation, and cinematic Special Effects, where the benefits of cross-border collaboration was likely to be even more dramatic.

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