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Mark Paraskeva, VP, EMIA, Autodesk Inc,

Mark Paraskeva, VP, EMIA, Autodesk Inc, was recently in India. Niranjan Mudholkar met him in New Delhi for his insights on how Autodesk is enabling the global transformation happening due to four key trends.

How is Autodesk enabling design professionals in the construction industry?
Let me tell you about some of the key global trends and how we are addressing them because that’s where the answer lies. Over the past few years we have seen four basic global trends, which we believe will continue. These trends are digitisation, globalisation, infrastructure boom and sustainability.

Today, digitisation has become an integral part of human life. From across various professional fields to music, web networking communities, CAD, telecom, etc., everything is getting digitised. It’s a huge trend that we think will continue.

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The second one is of course globalisation. India, particularly, is right in the middle of globalisation. It has been a key driver in India’s rising prosperity and international importance. Globalisation also shows how closely the world is connected as the world population moves from 6 billion to 9 billion, with all the off-shoring happening and the huge amount of trade between countries. For us this has huge implication.

What globalisation means to us is that our products need to enable design in one place and build in another. Gone are the days when someone in Delhi would design something and have it built here itself. Now, you design something here and it could be built somewhere else in the world. And this is possible only with digital tools.

The third big trend is this huge infrastructure boom. Think about 6 billion people becoming 9 billion people – they are all going to need more homes, more workplaces, more cars, more roads and so on. And if you think about it, we are enabling all of it. I have been travelling in India for the last few days and this country really needs good infrastructure. But even where I come from, we need it as well.

We need to replace the old infrastructure. That’s where the government is spending too. The fourth big trend, which is going to be a massive agenda for our children, is sustainability.

We human beings have grown carelessly in the past hundred years. We have just exploited all the raw material; drained all the cheap energy and although we have managed to grow the economy, we have done it without thinking about the future generations. So clearly sustainability is on everybody’s mind. It’s about how do we continue have the lifestyles and luxuries that we all want to have without damaging the planet. So for us, that’s a huge deal.

Agreed. But are you saying that Autodesk has relevance in places across the four trends?
Yes, we do because we enable the design of almost anything. For instance, when you have your shower in the morning, I bet the water system that delivered the water to your house was mapped with an Autodesk product. The shower fittings are probably designed using our manufacturing products.

Then, your breakfast was perhaps packaged by a machine designed by Autodesk. When you drive to work in a vehicle – its body and components were designed by our products and the road or the bridge too was probably designed using our product. As you get to a workplace – good chance that it was designed using another Autodesk product.