San Francisco – With more than half of its overall revenues coming from the SMB market, Autodesk Inc. is gearing up to focus more of its efforts in the enterprise space.
Steve Blum, the senior vice-president of Autodesk’s worldwide sales and services, told attendees at the company’s Global Channel Summit that despite having come out of the recent global financial crisis, the company still managed to achieve 14 per cent year over year growth. This year, he said the company’s expecting more growth with the addition of new enhancements to its partner program and its focus on the enterprise.
During his presentation at the summit, Blum outlined the company’s key areas of focus for this fiscal year.
“This year we’re focusing on expanding our channel capacity and capability,” Blum said. “We’ll also continue to invest in our enterprise customers, our subscription business, our renewal and attach rates and delivering value to our customers. We’ll also continue to invest in education and training (for our partners).”
Callan Carpenter, vice-president of global services at Autodesk said in an interview with CDN that the company isn’t forgetting about its SMB business, it just wants to grow with its partners in the enterprise space, which Autodesk counts as 5,000 or more employees.
Bill Griffin, vice-president of worldwide channel sales at Autodesk, said as part of its enterprise customer growth strategy, the company is in the midst of profiling accounts in the enterprise space and is building collaborative plans with partners to help drive sales in this space and to go “deeper and wider” with customers.
In addition to the SMB and the enterprise, Autodesk also serves professional businesses (anywhere between one to nine employees) and consumer customers.
At its Americas Channel Summit last year, the company unveiled its customer-centric business model approach. The company is continuing to make investments in this area and will also become more industry-focused in order to fully leverage its portfolio of products, Blum said.
The company, Carpenter explained, services three major markets: architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), manufacturing and film and game.
With its Autodesk Design and Creation Suites, Andrew Anagnost, vice-president of suites, Web services and subscription at Autodesk, said partners and end-users have the ability to move up-market to enter the enterprise space. The Design and Creation Suites include solutions for building design, factory design, product design and more.
“In the suites space, we have our direct force and we also have our partners, who can tell a bigger story (to their customers) now,” Anagnost said. “By using our suites and moving up-market, partners can take advantage of bigger deals and an expanded customer base.”
Company executives also announced that Autodesk suite subscriber customers can now take advantage of its Web services in the cloud.
Griffin commented on Autodesk’s cloud offering by saying, “We’re not an early adopter into the cloud. We’re a fast follower. The initial way we’re launching this is as an additional capability to your traditional hard media solution. It’s more of an ‘and’ function instead of an ‘or.’”
The Web services suite subscription offering will be delivered through Autodesk channel partners however how partners will be compensated is still to be determined.
“We want to see the adoption first,” Griffin said. “We’ve announced these cloud services and our customers aren’t sure how they’d use it yet. We’ll learn from these experiences and then come up with a compensation solution for our partners.”
Stephen Fletcher, vice-president of Western Canada at Canadian Gold level Autodesk partner, Cansel, said Autodesk currently represents about 15 of the company’s overall revenues.
“We see Autodesk as our single biggest area for growth,” Fletcher said. “But right now, I don’t know what the (Autodesk) cloud (strategy) will look like. I see that as a huge challenge. A lot of our clients don’t want their data out of house. They want to have it internally. So I’m not sure how much of a role cloud will play in our business.”
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