The Latest Cloud Connected Application From Autodesk

By Nick Harris

I make no secret of my enthusiasm for The Cloud. Over the last five years it has changed the way we work and connect with our colleagues and customers. We have moved our business infrastructure almost entirely to the Cloud, in the rooms where we used to keep our fleet of servers we just have stationary. Even our telephony, a service normally firmly tied to an office, is hosted and delivered from the cloud. We can work anywhere in the world and get the same user experience wherever we are, as long as we have access to a computer and a reasonable internet connection.

The most interesting aspect of our outsourced infrastructure is the ability to connect different parts of it together. The calendar services talk to the phone services so that if we are in a meeting, your call is routed to someone who is available. The phone services are connected to the customer service system so that when you call in for help we know who you are and your history with us, before we even answer the phone. We have a business system that appears to the users as one integrated software platform but which is delivered using separate, interconnected cloud services.

Traditional software development heavily relies on the reuse of existing code. Someone developing an application for backing up data, for example, may want to send an email to let you know once the backup job is complete. Sending emails is a common software task and so for that part of their application they will reuse someone else’s code, from an existing software library. The end user of the software doesn’t know that their application has code from many different sources, they are only concerned with knowing when their files are backed up successfully.

The Cloud takes this approach one step further. It allows users to bring multiple services together to provide functionality that would have been challenging inside a company network. Furthermore, it allows us to do it relatively cheaply and easily. Take our MapThat web GIS service. It is used by our customers to present all manner of data, in a geographical context, within a web browser. A local authority may use our maps to show the catchment areas of a school or present a theme based on the number of local traffic incidents. We have taken advantage of the revolution in web mapping to develop a feature rich application which is available to anyone who may need it, without the need for expensive IT infrastructure. We are bringing together and building on cloud services that are in turn a product of other services.

Autodesk is also accelerating the cloud services it is launching based on the building blocks it already has in place.  Autodesk BIM 360 Team is the cloud project collaboration service for construction. It is already being used in products like Autodesk Collaboration for Revit to allow users in different locations to work simultaneously on the same project. Project Calgary is a preview of a service that lets AutoCAD Plant 3D and AutoCAD P&ID users also work on the same data regardless of their location. It too uses BIM 360 Team to host the project data and special versions of the Autodesk Plant products to connect and work concurrently on project data. It is a preview and there is very little detail I can share with you here other than our Plant experts are very excited about it. As a team, they have struggled making collaboration outside of the network easy for Plant customers. Businesses working on Plant design projects often use multiple external contractors to supplement their internal expertise. Up until now the project sharing workflow can be resource intensive, with Project Calgary it looks to be hugely more straightforward. Click on the link below to join the preview and experience the technology for yourself. 

http://in-the-pipes.typepad.com/in_the_pipes/2017/01/index.html

From Autodesk In the Pipes

For further information on this article please contact your Account Manager or call our Sales Team on 01784 419922 or email sales@cadline.co.uk