Autodesk University 2019 Analyst gossip.

Earlier this month, the 19th and 20th of November to be exact, I was in Las Vegas to hear on the latest and greatest from engineering software innovator Autodesk.

Save lengthy prose, I thought it’d be much more interesting (?) to ask a few of attending Manufacturing Industry Analysts to chat on what we’d (thought we’d) heard. Please bear in mind that this conversation was completely unplanned, so don’t be too hard on attending mere mortals for errors, omissions etc….

BTW, I also attended Autodesk’s Forge Platform day, on Monday the 18th. An impressive crowd of well over 1000 attendees packed into the keynote to hear of the latest and greatest on Forge; Autodesk’s connected developer cloud platform . There’s much interest in the platform from the software developer community and large customers; especially in the AEC community. Saying that most interest and examples appears to be in AEC, there are a few users in the (industrial) Manufacturing space. CADShare, for one, have an interesting solution that allows OEMs to author and share and (3D augmented) spare-part information; Delivering web based technical publications, for instance, and helping users with part identification and ordering. You can find out more on their solution here.

Just a FYI, subsequent to this chat, I had subsequent clarifications and updates from the Autodesk team re Fusion360. Yes PLM via Fusion Lifecycle is in there, alive and kicking, but the acronym PLM is passe. Hurrah some might say! Also, and importantly, other Autodesk apps (as per the forthcoming Eagle EDA embed) are in process of being intimately embedded into the Fusion360 Platform as per the Eagle integration; think CAM, CAE etc. Interesting times ahead.

On the topic of Ansys Discovery Live. We chatted briefly in the video about possible Ansys announcements with other partners (beyond PTC). The announcement between PTC and Ansys (re Discovery Live and CREO) was made in June 2018 and I suspect a few of us will be interested in what happens on the topic in/around/after June 2020….Ansys are on the up, not just financially (as seen by recent financial results), but so too with major announcements with Autodesk at AU2019, and Rockwell on the 20th November.