Feature
Autodesk Forges its future
At Autodesk University 2021, the main hype was around Forge, the company’s cloud-based development platform for developers and customers. Launched in 2015, it’s been a long-time in the making, and it would seem the company is betting the farm on it. Martyn Day reports
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t Autodesk University 2021, the company’s CEO Andrew Anagnost dispensed with pushing Autodesk’s core design and collaboration products. Instead, he, along with the executive team, spent time eulogising Autodesk’s cloud services, connectivity tools and the development platform that enables this, which is called Forge. Autodesk has been building the Forge SaaS cloud platform for years, but until now it’s mainly been marketed to developers. Because the Forge development suite is so different to anything else on the design market, it needs careful explanation. Autodesk now needs to introduce its customers to new ways of thinking about design tools, data and how they should expect the Autodesk development community to plug into their digital ecosystems. Covid certainly forced AEC firms to sink or swim and pivot their entire IT systems to serve more distributed users, scramble to buy workstation-class laptops and accelerate cloud-based collaboration tools. Sure, in this process, many firms found new bottlenecks and had to rapidly deploy a whole new way of working but, amazingly, the industry managed. Autodesk feels this baptism of distributed working fire has forever changed the way firms work and now appreciate the flexibility and resilience of design firms having a cloud back-bone. In his keynote, Anagnost wanted to get customers to look beyond this conversion to cloud adoption; stage one of which is the distribution of files, “We’re going back to work. But we’re not going back to the way we used to work, we’re 34
January / February 2022
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certainly not going to stop storing our data in the cloud or collaborating in the cloud. If anything, we’ll be doing more of that. But when exporting, uploading and sharing giant files doesn’t produce giant returns, maybe it’s time we face a clear reality. It’s not our files that are valuable, but the data that’s locked inside them.” Autodesk’s advice for leveraging the value from latent customer data is to utilise its Forge platform. Up until this point, Forge was mainly talked about in the context of developers and APIs (Application Programming Interface) for cloud applications. Turning the promotion of Forge to customers seems like a big jump for developer tools as, I would suspect, very few users would currently have the ‘programming chops’ in-house to utilise it. But clearly, much of the messaging from AU was explaining to customers how Autodesk will be delivering a phase change in accessing authoring tools, cre-
ating data, collaborating around data, and applying technologies like machine learning. Autodesk is certainly the most clouddevout out of all the CAD firms. As others mainly focus on cloud servers and collaboration / connectivity, Autodesk is looking to completely move the centre of design away from distributed, desktop, file-based networks to a cloud-centric common data environment. Anagnost refers to these as information models. A Forge-centric future isn’t just a bunch of APIs and tools, it means an end to filebased working as we know it. Anagnost succinctly expressed how he feels about the potential of Forge, “No matter what industry you’re in, no matter what products you use, or where in the world you are, making data more accessible, more extensible and more open will help unleash your talent, connect your processes, automate your workflows, and unlock valuable insights.” www.AECmag.com
03/02/2022 15:42
