How can the cloud help make design processes faster and more efficient?

Cloud offers centralization of resources. We can now take the cloud and use it to offload the analysis or visualization for a concept from the PC. For example, a construction company that wants to make a decision on the optimum thickness of a wall would need to grow through 20 to 30 simulations to get the desired result and they would end up trying numerous desktops to achieve this. With the cloud, these simulations can be run in parallel and give 20 options simultaneously to the customer to help him make a choice.

The cloud can also be used to collaborate on design or visualization projects. You can take the design process and make it virtual or put in a cloud and have multiple individuals accessing it and collaborating on it. They can simultaneously make or review changes and discuss these changes or additions to the design and make them available in real-time mode.

Having said that, customers want to use the cloud to meet specific requirements. Many of our customers want to leverage the cloud for certain parts of their requirements and not for everything. For instance they are not comfortable with the data, or Intellectual Property (IP) moving to the cloud. In other cases, some customers might be comfortable with a certain part of the IP moving to the cloud. A large engineering enterprise might not be so comfortable in using the cloud to store and work on their IP.

However there will be a certain section of the customers who want to use our offerings purely on the SaaS model. For these customers, we are looking at offering a pure SaaS based design application which can be accessed from a web browser. For example, there is an application called Buzzsaw which is a pure SaaS based design application aimed for use by the construction industry.

There is another application called Green Building Studio which is an analytical application used by organizations to do an energy analysis. This application too is available with an as a cloud service option.

Would you otherwise look at offering the application via a private cloud model to address the large enterprise customer base which wants to leverage the cloud without putting data in the public domain?

Yes. We are supporting the private cloud model in a way that we have some of our product offerings enabled to support the Citrix environment. We have some customers in the government sector who have built private clouds and deployed our applications in these environments.

How is India as a market changing for you in terms of market opportunities?

One big opportunity for us is that of global companies doing business locally. One example is that of the movie industry in India. Many major global studios have special effect groups in India and big Indian companies such as Reliance have interests in special effects.

Additionally, spends on infrastructure in the country have gone up significantly in the last few years with the government also investing heavily in building infrastructure. Hence the construction and infrastructure industry has thrown up a lot of growth opportunities for us. Manufacturing as a vertical has also been growing steadily and so has been the entertainment sector.

We have customers such as DLF and L&T who have been using our solutions for the construction industry when they build infrastructure. Our application AutoCAD Civil 3D has also been used in the design stages for the Mumbai Monorail project. We have also been contributing to the Delhi Airport project through our design solutions.

Our applications have also been used by Visual Computing Labs (VCL), the animation, visual effects and gaming arm of Tata Elxsi Limited for making the Indian animated movie, Roadside Romeo. In the automotive sector, we have customers such as Tata Motors and Maruti Udyog which are using our design applications for building vehicles.