Autodesk Forge – distributed design data platform

I’m attending Autodesk Forge DevCon these days in San Francisco. This is first ever pure Development Conference. Autodesk is making an introduction of new Forge Platform. Forge is a future evolution of cloud products technologies development by Autodesk for the last few years. Some of you can recognize products such as Autodesk A360 and Viewer components.

After few years building products for cloud, Autodesk turns into “platform play” by developing infrastructure and APIs that can help to other companies to build products.

Some of you like me, remembering how to work with AutoLISP and AutoCAD, can see Autodesk Forge as a reinvention of AutoCAD platform for cloud era. Check-in my earlier post – Autodesk Forge – Reinventing AutoCAD platform. Things have changed for the last 20-25 years. New technologies came – cloud, internet, mobile devices, etc. So, elastic computing, micro-services and REST API are playing a key role in the way you access and re-use technological components and build solutions.

Below, you can see few photos I captured during the presentations yesterday and today related to Autodesk Forge and related technologies.

Cloud is reshaping industries according to Amar Hanspal, Senior VP of products at Autodesk.

Autodesk Forge is a platform behind all Autodesk cloud products.

Cloud technologies are empowering future transformation of manufacturing. The 4th industrial revolution is about Digital Thread, which integrates advanced software and technologies in manufacturing.

Autodesk Forge layers and components.

Finally, business model behind Autodesk Forge.

What is my conclusion? Autodesk is creating Forge as “Amazon Web Service” version for 3D and design data. The intent is to democratize design and to turn Forge into a distributed hub of design data. The data in this distributed data hub will be easy accessed to building applications to leverage design information upstream and downstream. Openness, robustness and access will be an important elements to make Forge platform success in the future. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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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.