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Autodesk, Inc. (), a Fortune 1000 company, is the world's leading software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, media and entertainment, and wireless data services fields. Autodesk was founded by John Walker and 12 other co-founders in 1982. Over its history, it has had various locations in Marin County, California, USA. It is currently headquartered in San Rafael, California.
Autodesk
Organization
Portfolio
History
Revit
| | Company Name | Autodesk, Inc. | | Company Logo | Image:Autodesk.png | | Company Type | Public company | | Foundation | Mill Valley, California, USA (1982) | | Location | San Rafael, California, United States | | Key People | John Walker (programmer) | | Industry | CAD/Computer-aided manufacturing | | Products | #Portfolio | | Revenue | profit $1.523 billion United States dollar | | Net Income | profit $328.9 million USD (FY 2006) | | Num Employees | 4,813 (FY 2006) |
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Organization
Autodesk is divided into six industry-specific business divisions: the Manufacturing Solutions Division (MSD), the Infrastructure Solutions Division (ISD), the Building Solutions Division (BSD), the Media and Entertainment Division (M&E), the Platform Technology Division (PTD), which includes Autodesk Collaboration Services and Autodesk Consulting, and the Location Based Services Division (LBS).
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Portfolio
The principal product offerings from the Media and Entertainment Division are Maya, 3ds max, Discreet Flame, Discreet Inferno, Discreet Smoke, Toxik and Lustre. These Academy Award winning products are covered on a dedicated page for the Media and Entertainment Division.
The Platform Technology Division develops and manages Autodesk's flagship product, AutoCAD, and AutoCAD LT.
The Manufacturing Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Inventor Series, Autodesk Inventor Professional, AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Vault.
The Infrastructure Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Map 3D, Autodesk Land Desktop, Autodesk Civil3D, Autodesk MapGuide, MapGuide Enterprise and the line of Topobase products.
The Building Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Architectural Desktop, Autodesk Building Systems, Autodesk Revit Building, Autodesk Revit Structure, and Autodesk Revit Systems
Other products include Autosketch, Autodesk Subscription Program and Autodesk LocationLogic.
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History
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Autodesk's first notable product was AutoCAD an CAD application designed to run on on IBM's recently born PC platform. This CAD tool allowed users to create detailed technical drawings, and was affordable to many smaller design, engineering, and architecture companies.
In Release 2.1 they introduced a new concept in CAD and software industry: the open platform software, by means of the introduction of a built-in Lisp interpreter with a custom dialect of the Lisp Language: AutoLisp, customized to program built-in particular AutoCAD solutions. Furthermore, they also implemented a C subset of its own libraries and made it available to developers. This brought as a result the "evolutionary" growth of a large collection of minor software companies developing solutions for AutoCAD as the main platform.
Since Release 12, the company stopped supporting the Unix environment, and since Release 14 it discontinued the MS-DOS releases and worked closely together with Microsoft sharing its base technology to achieve superior performance in the Windows operating system.
AutoCAD is the de facto standard non-specialized CAD solution and its file formats DXF and DWG are the most common for CAD interchange. Since the late 1990's, the company made a concerted effort to provide a product for every solution in the industry.
In 2002, Autodesk purchased a related parametric modeling software called Revit*, from Massachusetts-based Revit Technologies for $133 million. Revit, for the building solutions and infrastructure group and Inventor * for the manufacturing group, formed the foundation for future Autodesk products - a strong departure away from their 20-year old AutoCAD software code.
While there is no other single competitor of similar size in the design software industry, Autodesk's products compete against products from several smaller companies, including MicroStation, owned by Bentley Systems, ArchiCAD, owned by Graphisoft, SolidWorks, owned by Dassault Systemes, RoadEng, owned by Softree Technical Systems,12d Model, owned by 12d Solutions, and Pro/E, owned by PTC.
On October 4, 2005, Autodesk announced plans to acquire Alias in a cash acquisition valued at US$182 million dollars. On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD.
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Revit
Revit created by PTC alum Leonid Raiz and Irwin Jungreis, developed and marketed by Charles River Technologies, later Revit Technologies. First released in 2000. Sold to Autodesk in 2002.
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