I’m attending Autodesk University 2019 in Las Vegas. If you never been at AU, this is an annual extravaganza of Autodesk technologies and products. On Monday, I attended the pre-conference event Forge DevCon. And Forge is all about developers. The event was kicked off by Jim Quanci, Sr. Director of Autodesk Forge Partnership.
Autodesk Forge is a growing platform of cloud services that can be used by many things such as visualization, collaboration and automation of things. As every cloud service, the platform is growing within time. New services are added and the platform is becoming more stable, scalable and reliable.
Susanna Holt, Autodesk VP of Forge, explained these three important elements of cloud platform architecture – Microservices, Web API and DevOps.
For Autodesk, Forge Platform is a central driver for Digital Transformation in companies – both manufacturing and construction business.
Digital Transformation is a process that happens between Office, ERP, Collaboration, CRM and Design / Make environment. This is how Autodesk sees it.
And this is what companies don with Autodesk Forge.
One of the most central places in Autodesk Forge strategy is data. Data is coming from many data sources.
Data is messy and today mostly represented by files. According to Autodesk vision Files will be transformed into Data, which much more granular, accessible and can be consumed by users and applications, so everyone will get a piece of right data at the right time.
On this slide, you can see the current development priorities of Autodesk Forge as well as strategic move into a cloud data-driven environment.
What is my conclusion? Autodesk Forge is growing and maturing. In my view, this is a great confirmation of Autodesk cloud strategy to build a multi-tenant cloud platform. Autodesk Forge cloud development is very much resonating with the strategic technological reasons of building SaaS applications opposite to providing multi-cloud hosted solutions that can be available in any environment – on premise, privately hosted and public cloud. Autodesk has chosen this strategy a long time ago. Few other players in the market recognized the importance of multi-tenant development and SaaS applications. The most visible recent move in this direction is PTC acquisition by Onshape. Check my article – SaaS PLM – build the plane while you’re flying it and Why PTC is on the right track building multi-tenant PLM cloud platform. It will be interesting to see how this strategy will develop over the course of the next few years and compete with hosted multi-purpose multi-cloud solutions. An interesting time in engineering and manufacturing software approaching the next level of maturing in cloud development. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud-based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups, and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.
