Autodesk to power ahead in market

>> Autodesk launches new brand to reflect business transformation

Chris Bradshaw, Autodesk senior vice president and chief marketing officer said that the new  innovative brand would continue to inspire design, engineering, and animation professionals.

Has the Autodesk brand image ever changed and why now?

The new brand is the most significant change in our 30 year history. The last significant change, which happened more than ten years ago,was the move from the original calipers icon to the use of our name.

The short answer is the business is evolving. For most of our history, Autodesk catered only to professionals. Today we still serve more than 10 million professionals, but also provide software tools, cloud services, mobile apps and online communities to consumers, educators, and of course the ‘prosumer’ - the professional consumer.

We needed a new brand identity to reflect our commitment to the 100 million designers, engineers, architects, creative artists, students and hobbyists that use Autodesk software, cloud services and mobile apps to unlock their creativity, build better products and solve important challenges impacting the world.  

Who developed the new branding?

We decided to keep the creative process internaland pooled talented employees from five separate creative teams. They used our own technology to create the new branding, primarily Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya.

Autodesk primarily sells products through channel partners. How will the new branding affect channel partners?

The new brand presents an opportunity for our partners to participate in our momentum. We are aiming to grow awareness of the Autodesk brand, and when our company means more to more people, it will increase demand and growth, making it easier for partners to attract new customers.

Early in the process, we armed our partners with the right tools to understand the new Autodesk, via channel and partner portals. Communication began late last year; ensuring partners had ample time to prepare for the new branding.  

What countries and industry segments will the brand help Autodesk enter or expand in?

One of the most exciting aspects of the new business transformation is the opportunity it affords us to enter new markets, specifically with our cloud offerings. We constantly search for new ways to engage current customers and to add value to new customers and are looking at expanding in a number of developing markets including Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey and Russia.

We’re putting a lot of effort into our consumer offerings. More than 100 million consumers use Autodesk consumer products-that’s huge because we just introduced our consumer group in 2010. We’re going to focus a lot of our energy investing in that audience, using our trusted industrial grade technology tomake sure our technology is appealing to consumers.

Last year we announced our intention to expand our cloud offerings and we have some early success with SIM 360 and PLM 360. SIM 360 allows us to offer customers less expensive and simpler software using the infinite computing power of the cloud, making simulation available to more people and therefore more impactful in the design process, and by democratising PLM by moving it into the cloud, we deploy product lifecycle management in a way that is much more light-weight, while still meeting the needs of the users, rather than the top-down control needs of the organisation.