Autodesk
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Autodesk, Inc. | |
 |
|
| Type | Public (NASDAQ: ADSK) |
|---|---|
| Founded | Mill Valley, California, USA (1982) |
| Headquarters | San Rafael, California, USA |
| Key people | John Walker, Founder Carol Bartz, Executive Chairman Carl Bass, President and CEO |
| Industry | CAD/CAM Software [1] |
| Products | See complete products listing. |
| Revenue |  $1.523 billion USD (FY 2006) |
| Net income | $328.9 million USD (FY 2006) |
| Employees | 4,813 (FY 2006) |
| Website | www.autodesk.com |
Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK), a Fortune 1000 company, is a software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, media and entertainment, and wireless data services fields. Autodesk was founded by John Walker and twelve other co-founders in 1982. Over its history, it has had various locations in Marin County, California, USA. It is currently headquartered in San Rafael, California.
Contents |
[edit] 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).
[edit] Portfolio
The principal product offerings from the Media and Entertainment Division are Maya, 3ds max, Discreet Inferno, Discreet Flame, Discreet Fire, Discreet Flint, 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 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, Autodesk Building Systems, Autodesk Revit Building, Autodesk Revit Structure, and Autodesk Revit Systems
Other products include Autosketch, Autodesk Subscription Program and Autodesk LocationLogic.
[edit] Discontinued Products
From time to time Autodesk discontinues some of the products in their portfolio. Some of Autodesk's "retired" products are listed here.
Volo View was a web-enabled review and markup tool from Autodesk for engineering data, including support for Autodesk’s DWG, DXF, and DWF formats. Volo View enabled design teams to communicate ideas and review designs without access to AutoCAD software.
Autodesk discontinued sales of Volo View on May 1, 2005. The latest version of the software, Volo View 3, worked with the following file formats: AutoCAD 2004 DWG and DXF; Design Web Format (DWF 6); Autodesk Inventor 7 IPT, IAM, and IDW and raster files.
The functionality of this product is largely replaced by Autodesk Design Review. Autodesk has also released a free product called DWG TrueView. This product enables users to view and plot AutoCAD DWG and DXF files, and to publish these same files to the DWF file format.
Autodesk Animator Pro (DOS) and Autodesk Animator Studio (Windows) were products designed for cell based animation produced in the mid 1990's. At the time Autodesk was also advertising a Autodesk Media product similar in description to Macromedia's Director but this product was never released to the public.
Cyberspace by Autodesk was an early real time 3d environment capable of producing basic phong shaded walkthroughs of DXF format models in "realtime". No textures were supported, and the system appeared to support a maximum DXF model size of around 35kb. A popular demo model of the Parthenon in Greece was shown around the US in a tour of the portable demo system - complete with virtual reality goggles.
[edit] History
 |
The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. |
Autodesk's first notable product was AutoCAD, a CAD application designed to run on the systems known as "microcomputers" at the time, including those running the 8-bit CP/M operating system and two of the new 16-bit systems, the Victor 9000 and the IBM Personal Computer (PC). This CAD tool allowed users to create detailed technical drawings, and was affordable to many smaller design, engineering, and architecture companies.
In Release 2.1 the company's orientation to, 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.
Since Release 12, the company stopped supporting the Unix environment and the Apple Macintosh platform, 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.
In 2002, Autodesk purchased a related parametric modeling software called Revit[2], from Massachusetts-based Revit Technologies for $133 million. Revit, for the building solutions and infrastructure group and Inventor [3] 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, VectorWorks from Nemetschek, ArchiCAD, owned by Graphisoft, SolidWorks, owned by Dassault Systemes, RoadEng, owned by Softree Technical Systems,12d Model, owned by 12d Solutions,Pro/E, owned by PTC, and SDS/2 owned by Design Data.
On October 4, 2005, Autodesk announced plans to acquire Alias in a cash acquisition valued at US$182 million. On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD.
[edit] Revit
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.
[edit] External links
- www.autodesk.com
- Autodesk Student Community
- 3dswiki
- Early AutoCAD information
- The Autodesk File, a History of Autodesk
- Autodesk Sponsorship of CGSociety Challenges
