'To stay productive in a digital environment, create, manage, and share content'

Be it the culture in Autodesk or the sheer passion to help build better
infrastructure that has ensured that Carl Bass, COO, Autodesk, has
remained with the company for over 10 years.
In his current role, Bass is responsible for sales, marketing, and
product development for Autodesk's core lines of business. Recently, he has
been named the president and CEO, effective from May 1, 2006.  He has been with Autodesk in various groups and capacity.
Prior to becoming COO, he was the senior executive VP of the Design Solutions
Group. Before that, Bass served as chief strategy officer and executive VP of
emerging business, looking broadly across the Autodesk organization at strategy
and growth opportunities that have helped bring the company to the leadership
position it occupies today.

Bass also had the proverbial entrepreneurial itch and found Buzzsaw and
earlier Ithaca Software, which were acquired by Autodesk. In an interview with Yograj
Varma of Dataquest, Bass talks about a range of subjects from the evolution
of Autodesk to piracy to India strategy.

Autodesk has morphed into a digital content company from being a design
software company, and is now looking at digital management (given your stress on
ILM). Has that been a natural evolution, or have you and Carol Bartz forced it?

Like in any business, this evolution has been due to the customers. We have
been mapping our customers very closely and realized that we have to be a step
ahead of the customers in terms of their requirement. Clearly, the buzzword
today is to stay productive in a digital environment and this is possible by
'creating, managing, and sharing of digital content'. In today's
transacting environment, designers create and manage files in a digital format.
However, there are times when they revert to the analog format to share the
design data. For example, the case of a building file in digital format; this
could be shared with a diverse user group like town planning authorities for
approvals and also to the construction firms actually implementing the project.
It is time to take control of your design data and move away from the printed
formats. This warranted the need of us moving to become a digital management
company.

Referring to the recent announcement of APac Emerging Geo, encompassing
India-what is its purpose?

This is really an indication of the increasing importance of India for
Autodesk. I think there is a tremendous opportunity here. India has shown that
it is a good and fast adopter of new technologies. Moreover, I think, India has
an advantage as it can learn from the mistakes other regions have made. The APac
Emerging Geo, which will encompass India, and the Greater China region was
formed to address the rapid growth of our business here. The growth in this
region has been exponential and we need to focus our attention on a special
strategy to suit the requirements of this market. We need to pay significant
attention to the Indian market and tailor our business strategies to suit the
requirements of our customers here and not vice-versa.

Beyond that, what is your India strategy?

I reiterate that the potential for us in India makes the country a very
significant market for us. So beyond the formation of the APac Emerging Geo, we
are looking at serious investment in India-in terms of increasing our staff
strength to service our growing business needs. India along with China will have
an increased focus from Autodesk's headquarters. In order to ensure that APac
Emerging Geo has direct access to Autodesk's core leadership, we have
constituted the Emerging Geo Steering Committee, headed by Autodesk's
chairman, Carol Bartz. This shows the importance we are giving to India and you
will see more India specific announcement during the year.

India is fast emerging as an important hub for outsourced engineering
design? What will be the Autodesk impact?

This is a great opportunity for Autodesk's manufacturing solutions. With
India becoming a global outsourcing hub and with the Indian SME segment becoming
integral in the global sourcing partnership environment. It is absolutely
necessary that Indian organizations must deploy state-of-the-art technology
including those relating to collaboration and design to be competitive in a
global environment and to also be technologically compatible with their
principals overseas.

How serious is the issue of piracy for Autodesk?

Piracy is a global phenomena and a major cause of concern to all major
software vendors including us. With a piracy rate of over 75%, I think that this
is a serious deterrent to the growth of our business in the country. However, we
also realize that piracy cannot be done away with and we are working towards
educating the customers on the ills of using pirated software and encouraging
them to legalize.

What are your expectations from the third world countries? Where do you
see them in terms of using high-end design software for building infrastructure?

There is a tremendous potential in these markets, which I would like to call
emerging economies. Yes, I do believe there is a tremendous potential for
digitization in the Indian building and infrastructure industries. India has
over 35,000 architects and 100 thousand draftsmen. For these professionals to
stay abreast of their current transacting ecosystem and to stay competitive,
they need to constantly upgrade their digital design and collaborative tools.
These 150 thousand professionals use Autodesk's Building Industry Solutions as
mission critical tools. The growth of this segment in India and China will be
dramatic. More than 45% of building material in the world is used in these
countries.

With India becoming an important international business hub, the construction
and infrastructure segments too are growing to meet the new requirements. There
is the need to provide the requisite commercial and residential facilities as
per international standards in addition to the correlating infrastructure. Our
building and infrastructure solutions have the potential to play a very
important role here.

What is the revenue split for Autodesk?

In terms of services, subscription, and new seats Autodesk's revenues for
FY04 are $1.234 bn. Business by geography: America-41%; Europe-36%; Asia
Pacific-23%.

What are some of the factors that hinder the adoption of computer aided
design in India?

It is the comparatively high cost of PCs and a relatively young network
infrastructure. But we believe that these problems will be resolved in the near
future to facilitate deployment of digital design and online collaborative
services.