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Autodesk, Inc. (), a Fortune 1000 company, is the world's leading software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, media and entertainment, and wireless data services fields. Autodesk was founded by John Walker and 12 other co-founders in 1982. Over its history, it has had various locations in Marin County, California. It is currently headquartered in San Rafael, California.
Autodesk is the originator of the FLC (flick) animation file format.
Organization
Autodesk is divided into six industry-specific business divisions: the Manufacturing Solutions Division (MSD), the Infrastructure Solutions Division (ISD), the Building Solutions Division (BSD), the Media and Entertainment Division (M&E), the Platform Technology Division (PTD), which includes Autodesk Collaboration Services and Autodesk Consulting, and the Location Based Services Division (LBS).
Portfolio
The principal product offerings from the Media and Entertainment Division are Maya, 3ds max, Discreet Flame, Discreet Inferno, Discreet Smoke, Toxik and Lustre. These Academy Award winning products are covered on a dedicated page for the Media and Entertainment Division.
The Platform Technology Division develops and manages Autodesk's flagship product, AutoCAD, and //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD#AutoCAD_LT AutoCAD LT.
The Manufacturing Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Inventor Series, Autodesk Inventor Professional, AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Vault.
The Infrastructure Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Map 3D, Autodesk Land Desktop, Autodesk Civil3D, Autodesk MapGuide, MapGuide Enterprise and the line of Topobase products.
The Building Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Architectural Desktop and Autodesk Revit.
Other products include Autosketch, Autodesk Subscription Program and Autodesk LocationLogic.
History
Autodesk featured AutoCAD (formerly named MicroCAD) at COMDEX in 1982. Initially AutoCAD was written for multiple operating systems, focusing on the CP/M architecture, but also made a branch for DOS and Unix.
The company's ultimate goal was to achieve a major software brand (AutoCAD) running upon IBM's recently born PC platform. Thus, its power was its weakness: a relatively mediocre CAD application (due to Intel and MS-DOS limitations those days), available on a widespread platform. It made a CAD tool, good enough to create detailed technical drawings, possible and affordable to many smaller design, engineering, and architecture companies.
The further versions and implementations (Release 2.1 introduced a new (for those days) concept in CAD and software industry: the open platform software, by means of the introduction of a built-in Lisp interpreter with a custom dialect of the Lisp Language: AutoLisp, customized to program built-in particular AutoCAD solutions. Furthermore, they also implemented a C subset of its own libraries and made it available to developers.
This brought as a result the "evolutionary" growth of a large collection of minor software companies developing solutions for AutoCAD as the main platform (as an operating system one could say). Since then, Autodesk has profited greatly from these developments by buying the cutting edge companies that made major improvements to its software. These companies' code is then brought into the AutoCAD codebase where it can be retooled for use in new products.
Since Release 12, the company abandoned the Unix environment, and since Release 14 it discontinued the MS-DOS releases and worked closely together with Microsoft sharing its base technology to achieve superior performance in the Windows operating system.
AutoCAD is the de facto standard non-specialized CAD solution and its file formats DXF and DWG are the most common for CAD interchange. Since the late 1990's, the company made a concerted effort to provide a product for every solution in the industry, often purchasing competing companies and technologies. Because of this and their lack of similarly-powerful competitors, many critics regard the company as the Microsoft of the design software industry.
In 2002, Autodesk purchased a competing software called Revitfrom Massachusetts-based Revit Technologies for $133 million. Revit, for the building solutions and infrastructure group and Inventor [http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=4246282 for the manufacturing group, formed the foundation for future Autodesk products - a strong departure away from their 20-year old AutoCAD software code.
While there is no other single competitor of similar size in the design software industry, Autodesk's products compete against products from several smaller companies, including MicroStation, owned by Bentley Systems, ArchiCAD, owned by Graphisoft, SolidWorks, owned by Dassault Systemes, 12d Model, owned by 12d Solutions, and Pro/E, owned by PTC.
On October 4, 2005, Autodesk announced plans to acquire Alias in a cash acquisition valued at US$182 million dollars. On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD.
Revit
Created by PTC alum Leonid Raiz and Irwin Jungreis, developed and marketed by Charles River Technologies, later Revit Technologies. First released in 2000. Sold to Autodesk in 2002.
External links
- www.autodesk.com
- Early AutoCAD information
- The Autodesk File, a History of Autodesk
- UK Autodesk Manufacturing Solutions
- Autodesk Sponsoship of CGSociety Challenges
Computer companies of the United States | Companies based in Marin County | Fortune 1000 | Software companies | S&P 500
"Autodesk"