Time to find out what’s inside your Industry Collection

By Nick Harris

The changes Autodesk has been making to its pricing and packaging over the last couple of months is clearly sign posting its intention for businesses purchasing desktop products. Since launching the Subscription only Industry Collections last year, Autodesk has been very open about its preference for both new and existing customers to invest in the Collections rather than individual design products. The pull approach so far this year has included a promotion to allow maintenance customers to easily switch to an Industry Collection subscription, as well as an increase in the number of products included with each Collection. There has been a push too, price changes applied recently and scheduled for the future will make it much more expensive to renew a Suite Maintenance plan compared to a Collection Subscription. Autodesk is also removing from sale some individual products and making them only available through a Collection.

As a result, it is going to be increasingly likely over the next year that you and your organisation will become an Autodesk Collection customer and have access to much more technology than you have had in the past. If you are not aware, the Collections provide users with access to more than 20 different Autodesk software applications and cloud services with the purchase of a single licence. The software included in the Collections is the familiar core design products such as Revit, AutoCAD Civil 3D and Inventor as well as sophisticated simulation, visualisation and data management software that you may be less familiar with.  

The question you may be asking is what use is all this extra software? If you have been using Revit or Inventor successfully for some time you may think that it is all the software you need. However, every user gets frustrated with the limitations of the software they use every day, often because they are trying to push it beyond its intended use. Revit has been criticised for its lack of functionality for masterplanning and process design. The AEC Collection includes both Revit but also InfraWorks, a product designed specifically for large scale construction masterplanning. It also includes AutoCAD Plant 3D which again has been specifically developed for designing process plant installations. You may now use more software in your workflow, but is very likely you have removed constraints that have been limiting your productivity.

The Autodesk Industry Collections give you an opportunity to rethink and enhance your current way of working by providing access to software that meets all your needs not just some of them. When you are using software that is designed for the exact task you are using it for then better outcomes are inevitable. Now is a good time to find out what each Collection offers your business, remember that they have probably evolved since you last looked.