Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Autodesk webinar on Architecture, Engineering, and Construction business segment. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If you have a question, you may key star one on your touch-tone telephone. If at any time during the call you require assistance, please press star followed by zero, and we will be happy to assist you. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I'll now turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, David Gennarelli, Director of Investor Relations. You may proceed.
Thanks, Operator. Good morning. Thank you for joining our webinar to discuss our AEC business segment. Joining me today is Jay Bhatt, Senior Vice President of AEC. This meeting is being broadcast live via webcast and will be available for replay later today. The presentation we are making today may contain forward-looking statements about future results, performance, achievements, and/or plans. Please refer to the discussion of our risk factors that may affect our future results contained in Autodesk SEC filings, including the Form 10-K for the fiscal year 2011 and Form 10-Q for the quarters ended April 30 and July 31, 2011. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jay.
Okay. Thank you, David, and welcome everybody on the phone. Pleased to be here today to give you an update on the AEC business. Let me start by just clicking on this Safe Harbor statement here. David covered a bunch of this, so I think we're good here. I want to get into the bulk of my presentation for now, but I wanted to post this prior to doing that. I want to start with just a look at the revenue, and I want to look at it in terms of the annual progression of AEC revenue as we report, and then a Q2 breakdown per Carl's earnings release a little while ago.
As you can see, we had a very strong growth rate leading into the recession, had a pretty significant dip in the recession, as many companies did, on the back of pretty significant consequences of the macro-economic recession to our end customers and industries. We really did start the recovery in our last fiscal year, fiscal year 2011, and you can see the AEC organization, AEC revenue for Autodesk grew at 11% to $568 million for FY 2011. I think more relevant to the go-forward are the Q2 numbers that we announced. Again, despite an uneven economy and pockets of weakness, we had a very, very strong Q2. Carl mentioned that on the call. I'll reiterate that. Everything I talk about is going to be based on the end of quarter, the second quarter, fiscal year second quarter, which is when we reported officially our numbers.
Really, really strong, 19% growth and $158 million in revenue. We had a record revenue quarter for the Revit family of products, and by that, I mean all of the Revit flavors of products for the building industry, from architecture to MEP engineering to structural engineering. That's driven by the pretty significant investment that we've made on the R&D side and on the go-to-market side around our engineering products over the last two years. We're also selling the Revit line into the contractor segment. The general contractors and specialty contractors are using building information modeling tools like Revit to really drive efficiency and productivity.
I do want to mention that we are, as I think David and Mark mentioned at the last venue that we were presented at, we are very aware of the market around us and very aware of the concern in the financial markets and in the macro-economic environment. Therefore, I would say we are tapping on the brakes of the company and being prudent about spend. We are fairly, you know, as you saw, as you see on the slide, we had a very strong end-user uptake of our products at the end of Q2, and we're really pleased about that. Although we do understand that the AEC industry itself is facing some headwinds and continues to face some headwinds. I feel like we've built our business, our AEC business, to withstand the turmoil.
I don't think we're subject to the ups and downs, the dramatic ups and downs of the commercial construction market, as you can see in the fiscal year numbers as well as in the quarterly numbers. I do feel like we have some pretty interesting opportunities baked into our strategy that allow us to really execute through tough times and strong times. What I will say is that I want you to think about our business slightly differently per today's presentation. I'm going to start with the pyramid slide that I presented last time, last year at our Investor Day. If you think about what we're talking about here on this pyramid slide, we're trying to explain the customer base in AEC to you in the context of segments.
If you think about the base part of the pyramid, that foundational part of the pyramid where we have a thin, long stretch of yellow customer baseline, that's really, you think of that as the consumer segments for us. That's where those are consumers that purchase Autodesk software to do something, to design, to construct, to produce results. If you think about the middle part of the pyramid, that's the SMB segment, the small to medium-sized business segment. You can see we're quite wide at the low end. We're quite wide in customer base at the low end of that segment, and we thin out as you get into the upper, the more professional, the more scaled small to medium-sized businesses in our industry across architects and civil engineers and plant engineers, etc.
Then you can see that very sliver tip in the top of the pyramid, which is the enterprise part of the pyramid for enterprise buying, enterprise customers. We are very thin in terms of our penetration of that enterprise customer segment. What I want you to really think about is the opportunity for Autodesk, which is the way I'm going to explain this, the way I'm going to go through this presentation in the context of this expanded look at the pyramid. If the pyramid of gray is the potential addressable market, we think we can expand our total addressable market from that yellow impression out to the orange segment. We can get more of the consumer customer base going lower, but we can expand out in the small to medium-sized business and in the enterprise segment by doing a few critical things.
We can expand our footprint and are starting to do that per the 19% growth number on Q2 by leveraging the movement to building information modeling that is very palpable in the industry today. We have a very, very strong AEC industry uptake of building information modeling tools and technologies that really drive a process change. We feel that we are very effectively influencing the value chain with technologies. We actually believe today, and this was not true three or four or five years ago when I spoke to you, but today, we feel that the top of that chain, the most influential entities, the owners, the large contractors, the government agencies are absolutely influencing their own value chains. We're getting our products are getting designed in, if you will, to the specifications and requirements that are being mandated down into the value chain.
That's a very strong movement for us. The next thing I'm going to talk a little bit more about in the presentation is expanding our share of wallet. We've had customers for a long time purchase tools from us, but they've been static in their purchases. They bought a lot of AutoCAD or LT, etc. We feel for the first time ever, there are certain segments that we can really expand our share of wallet and drive an expanded footprint into. I'm going to talk about that. We also feel that there are new segments that we can reach now because of the expanded portfolio that we have, because of the power of the building information modeling message and the concept of information through the value chain, you know, across building and infrastructure and plant, etc.
I'm going to talk about some of these new segments, some of the exciting opportunities that exist around the new segments. Finally, you heard Carl talk a lot about suites. We've talked a lot about suites and the execution around suites in the past, but suites really came to fruition in the second quarter. We had a very, very strong suites quarter. I'm going to talk a lot as an AEC group, and I'm going to talk a lot about that in the presentation today as well. Let me open by talking a little bit about the industry challenges, and I'll very quickly go over it. We are not blind to the industry challenges because there are absolutely things that put pressure on the AEC professionals all over the world.
I think that it's Autodesk's core strength and our ability to offer integrated model-based solutions that allow these AEC professionals to meet and exceed the challenges they face every day and to capitalize on the opportunities in front of them. Some of the challenges that exist for AEC professionals around the world include urbanization. McKinsey, the large consulting firm, estimates that by the year 2030, 5 billion people will live in urban environments, which is an increase from 3.5 billion today. You can absolutely see this suburban flight to urban environments. That means a lot of renovation, construction, and infrastructure updating has to go on to accommodate this movement. Natural resources are absolutely constrained. You have resource constraints that have become an issue for corporations and municipal governments. They have to do more with less.
They have to be more productive in their processes, in their execution, and their construction practices. We play a big role there. Competition, the global recession has dramatically affected the level of new construction and has changed the expectations for the bottom line. I've talked about this before, but a significant number of professionals in segments like architecture have been, I guess what you would call disintermediated or have lost the ability to execute or do jobs. There are fewer projects being done today. That represents, I think, an opportunity for Autodesk in the portfolio that we offer when you think about the efficiency and productivity driving benefits of technology. I'll talk about that. Project complexity is absolutely escalating. The number of requirements from clients is growing.
There are increasingly more stakeholders involved, and poor performance across the value chain is now on the list of potential liability risks associated with the projects. These liabilities have to be eradicated. That's something that Autodesk really plays in. Finally, technology as a critical factor has a huge amount of momentum, has a huge amount of voice in the change process that's occurring in the industry that we serve, changing the way we work and giving us greater access to ever-growing amounts of data. That's true. Frankly, construction and infrastructure has been one of the big macro-economic GDP segments that has been one of the last to flip to really aggressive embracers and adopters of technology. You're starting to see that change today. Let me talk about the five ideas I mentioned on that pyramid slide in the context of a breakdown. Let's start with BIM.
Building Information Modeling, which is a concept that we've talked about for a long time, the idea that information at the core of design and construction will allow professionals to do more, to be more efficient, to be more productive, to be more cost-effective, time-effective. BIM continues to transform the entire global AEC industry. It's helping AEC professionals and owners in every segment of the industry realize benefits at every point in the project lifecycle. Simply put, while BIM was a concept and a really evangelical idea seven, eight, nine years ago when we introduced it, it is absolutely for real in the circles of AEC today. Let me give you some McGraw Hill statistics that have been recently published around BIM. Almost half of the U.S. building industry is using BIM today, which is a 75% increase since 2007.
You can see the escalation occurring in the U.S., which is the leading environment for BIM use. 70% of owners in the U.S. report a positive ROI from using BIM. That's owners. This is those designed entities, the entities that really can control their value chain. They're forcing the use of BIM, and they're experiencing ROI benefits. 60% of U.S. architects create BIM models with half of these performing analysis on these models. The idea of sustainable analysis, early conceptual energy analysis, are really critical ideas for architects today as they try to win business and differentiate themselves. Architects have turned to BIM tools and technology to really drive that behavior. BIM has been adopted by 36% of construction companies in Western Europe, according to McGraw Hill. If you think about the U.S. being the early adopting, early influencer, it's starting to migrate into Western Europe and even into Asia-Pacific.
We'll talk about that. Finally, in the next few years, the use of BIM by structural engineers is expected to double. By MEP engineers, which are those piping, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers on building projects and plant projects, it is supposed to triple. Civil engineers, the people that do water, wastewater, transportation, large-scale infrastructure, are expected to quadruple in terms of the use of BIM. In fact, I'll highlight civil infrastructure here for a moment because the concept of Building Information Modeling, while once really focused on the building segment of AEC, is really starting to become pervasive and scale in the civil infrastructure segment. It's really helping our business there. I wanted to explain BIM as a real phenomenon now in terms of disruptive workflow because I think that's one of the key drivers of our business today.
Another driver of our business right now is around the value chain influence. We call it, we've coined the term designed in as the concept that we refer to when you think about the top of the value chain influencing and driving standards into its work process. One of the statistics that was reported by McGraw Hill is that 70% of owners in the U.S. are seeing a positive ROI from BIM. This is allowing us, you know, Autodesk, to have a great amount of influence across the AEC market because our BIM solutions are getting designed in from the very start of projects by these owners. A great example is, and we're showing you an example from one of our customers.
In 2009, the University of Southern California, USC, dedicated a new $165 million multi-building complex of housing and classrooms, etc., and production labs, things like that, as well as a 200-seat theater, an exhibition hall, and a cafe situated off a central courtyard. Driven by USC's commitment to BIM, the design teams, which are the fabricators, the BIM facilitator, the contractors, all use BIM processes and software solutions for the design and construction of the complex. Throughout the project, Navisworks Manage was used to help aggregate disparate design and fabrication models into a single master model for cross-disciplinary collaboration, coordination, and clash detection, which is that concept of clash happening between pipes and beams and substructures of a building that result in huge amounts of cost and waste.
Getting designed in at USC meant the mandated use of BIM that impacted not only the architectural design process but also extended BIM's reach into building engineering and construction segments. During construction, the team continued to rely on Autodesk's BIM solutions for visualization, for coordination, and for better planning with teams using BIM and referencing Revit and Navisworks models from computers in the construction trailers and from mobile devices as well. This is a really important movement because all of this good use of BIM, efficient execution, really happened around a specification that was created by the USC organization, by the USC Educational School University, and by this designed-in idea. Designed in and the influence of the value chain, very important idea.
Next concept I want to talk about is the expansion of the share of wallet that we're driving in segments that we've always served, but we've served with sort of single-dimensional tools. You know the real strong brand of AutoCAD and LT. AutoCAD LT had been very strong in building engineering and construction, for instance. The expansion of our toolset along information lines and the escalation of applications that utilize that information through the BIM workflow have allowed us to really expand. In this example that you're seeing on the screen here, ATP architects engineers has been using BIM to support its architectural design efforts for years.
Because of the investments we've made into our engineering products and the contraindication or making our products more applicable for local environments, the firm has adopted our Revit software for its structural and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design and is one of the first firms in Central Europe to implement a fully integrated multidisciplinary BIM workflow. ATP's most recent BIM project is the design of this new 30,000 sq ft shopping mall in Slovenia. This project was designed to very ambitious energy standards, and the analysis that our BIM models provided to support the process is helping to make all of this possible. You can see that in this case, this multidisciplinary engineering firm and architecture firm moved from just architectural use and straight AutoCAD use in the engineering portfolio to really an expanded use of tools. This is true.
This expansion of wallet is true in the construction process as well. A great example is one of our customers, Skanska, which is one of the world's largest project development and construction groups. They have expertise in construction development on commercial and residential projects, as well as public-private partnerships. One of the partnerships they have, one of the joint ventures, is with a company called Atkins and Skanska Balfour Beatty Joint Venture, which is using BIM to meet the demands of the widening of the M25 highway that circles London. In that project, you started to see this share of wallet be expanded from two-dimensional representations and blueprint creation to this really expanded BIM portfolio.
It helped them make better informed decision-making for improved safety, better understanding of the design among the engineers, better coordination of the design disciplines, and a bunch of resolution of interdisciplinary conflicts prior to construction, which reduced costly errors. Another great example of expansion of wallet and expansion of use. The next big idea that's helping us expand our footprint, it looks like I'm a little frozen here. Just a second, I've got the slides frozen. I'm trying to unfreeze them. Here we go. Okay. The next idea that I wanted to talk about was the new segment expansion that Autodesk is really driving with the expansion of our portfolio, with the brand recognition of Autodesk as the key BIM provider in the world.
We are supporting our expanded share in this case, in the large-scale infrastructure business, around two new products, one of which I'm going to talk about in this slide and one on the next, Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler and our AutoCAD Utility Design tool. Let me talk about Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler first. If you think about the idea of civil infrastructure, large-scale urban planning, water, wastewater, transportation networks, these are huge planning endeavors where the spend on design is a fraction of the spend on the planning process. If you think about the time spent in planning on large-scale infrastructure, it's 3x or 4x the time spent in design. Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler is a tool that we've recently released that's a conceptual design tool that fits into the plan phase of the infrastructure lifecycle.
The three main capabilities of the Infrastructure Modeler tool for us, we can quickly and easily create existing infrastructure models. We can sketch and evaluate design alternatives in the same model. We can communicate through rich visualizations and proposals to stakeholders so they can really explain what their intentions are and win business. An example of the power of this tool is the city of Boston, which was modeled in roughly an hour in Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler using GIS data freely available on the city's website. As shown here, the city can now be interrogated in 3D. It's built based on the underlying data.
GIS queries can be made, such as show me all the buildings over 30 meters high and things like that that allow for a really good conceptual understanding and a really great start toward the infrastructure modeling process that will ultimately occur during production. This is a really exciting idea built on the framework of our tools and built in connection with our tools that allows this planning opportunity to be really expanded for us and us to get into this new segment. The second new segment I want to talk about is our utility design segment. That is sort of the large utilities around the world. If you think about the utility design need, it spans both distribution and transmission.
I want to talk a little bit about the distribution problem today because a large amount of AutoCAD LT and two-dimensional representations are really used to do utility distribution modeling and design. We've recently released AutoCAD Utility Design 2012, which is software that delivers a building information modeling solution for electrical distribution model-based design that combines the power of 3D model-based design and documentation with rules-driven standards, workflow, and analysis. A great example of this model-based design and documentation is on the screen. You can see on the top screen a modeled representation of the distribution networks and on the bottom screen a 2D representation. This is great because people are used to doing it in 2D, but it's a more effective, more productive approach to do it in 3D. We've not lost the familiarity for the user as we represent this product.
You can see it in the two screen visualizations. As simple as drawing lines, utility designers can quickly and easily create electrical distribution systems, but they're really rich models underneath this line orientation. That's really important because more can be done with information in the model. There are tens of thousands of utility designers out there using AutoCAD that are the natural market for AutoCAD Utility Design Solution. That's really the focus of where we're going here in this new segment. The next new segment I want to talk about is process and plant. We've talked about this for a number of years with you. This is the process and plant, process and power engineering use of tools. Again, another big AutoCAD and two-dimensional play linked to databases on the backend for management of these facilities.
As I just referenced in the AutoCAD Utility Design segment or the utility segment, this is a classic Autodesk play meant to leverage the huge installed base of AutoCAD to drive vertical solution growth. We're focused here on verticalizing the segment with a better idea, with a better solution, which is built around model-based design. Our plant solutions, the Plant Design Suite, is accomplishing this in a significant way. An example here is Kraftalagen Heidelberg, which is the example I'm showing you on a page here, which has been an AutoCAD user for years. They recently adopted a solution that includes Autodesk Inventor, which is our manufacturing machine model-based design tool, in conjunction with AutoCAD Plant 3D, which is our building information modeling tool for plants, to help them become more efficient by integrating the process of equipment design and process design.
You can see some of the representations on the screen here of how these models create better rich visualizations and ultimately better analysis and simulation for the very complex task of process designs that occurs all over the world, whether it's greenfield or brownfield design. The last big idea I wanted to, or the fourth big idea I want to talk about that coordinates with that pyramid slide and those ideas on the left side that I said are expanding our footprint, is the concept of suites. I think everything I've talked to leads perfectly to me talking now about our suites. There are many AEC professionals like Kraftanlagen on the last slide that are looking for an integrated set of solutions that together give them a more efficient and productive way of doing what they do best, which is creating innovative designs.
With our suites and the introduction of suites really through the second quarter, we have optimized how our customers and our potential customers purchase and implement our model-based solutions. The market's response to our introduction of suites has been fantastic, frankly phenomenal. In fact, there were over 27,000 users who made the switch to our Building Design Suite in Q2 alone, which makes it the fastest growing suite in the Autodesk portfolio. That's the Building Design Suite, the second set of product representation that you see on the slide. In the building and infrastructure space, in the AEC space, we have four suites that we offer: one for plant design, one for the building segment, one for the infrastructure segment, and then the Autodesk Design Suite, which is the AutoCAD-based suite that is the baseline suite. Really exciting introduction of suites.
We believe it's an operational vehicle that helps our customers do their job more effectively and use more of our products, and it also helps us grow our business. Finally, we are not resting on 12- or 24-month revenue production as the only execution by any means. I think you've seen that in the way Autodesk has behaved and performed over the last number of years. We are absolutely trying to innovate and evolve into the future and predict the future in some ways. We're investing in the future of model-based design. With the rapid growth in mobile applications, you can see Navisworks on a mobile device on the upper left side through an augmented reality approach. These are concepts that are going to be very important to field workers all over the world.
If you think about the pervasiveness of the iPod or the iPad or the mobile device and the importance of delivering information to that device so that jobs can be done more effectively, efficiently, and accurately, this is going to be an incredibly important trend in our industry, and we're investing there. BIM 360, Autodesk BIM 360 is a very, very important, very big idea that you'll hear us talk a lot about over the next few years. That is the idea that we have created this explosion of digital information because of BIM into the industry. The industry is looking for a way to manage that information more effectively, to collaborate and coordinate around it.
Our tool, the set of solutions that we're offering around BIM 360, including AEC Vault, including Buzzsaw as an entitlement to Vault, as well as many other tools that allow you to leverage and manage that information, is going to be incredibly important for customers in infrastructure and building to adopt as they proliferate information at the core. The third big future idea is this idea that the industry will, that time and computer-intensive processes like rendering need to move into the cloud so the desktop can be freed up to work on design while this analysis is happening in the background. You've heard us talk about this in the context of energy analysis or structural analysis, which is another cloud-based workflow we've introduced recently.
The one I'm showing on the bottom left corner here is rendering in the cloud, our Project Neon, which you can see through our Autodesk Labs site. Very powerful rendering offered in the cloud as background computing power to your design task. Finally, on the bottom right, this is something I wanted to feature here. It's really exciting. That's the idea of this product called Photofly, which is a digital photography input into a model-based design workflow that allows you to take digital photos, and start the modeling process right after the photo. Think about how powerful that is for the renovation and retrofit markets that will be pervasive in the developed world. Think about how powerful that is to capture existing conditions.
If you want to see something amazing, go to our lab site and check out Photofly and look at the fidelity of the model that is built off the digital photo. It's an amazing glimpse into the future around how building models will be created. Let me move on. Let me wrap up. I'm trying to keep as much time as I can for questions. Last year when we met, I talked about how I saw a real opportunity for growth across the AEC value chain, notwithstanding the fact that we were still struggling through the remnants of the recession and trying to recover through FY 2011. I don't think there's any doubt that AEC, the division, and Autodesk overall have capitalized on that opportunity over the last few quarters for sure. I think we took market share in the downturn, and I think we're growing again.
The industry, as you can see through the Q2 number of 19% growth, will continue to experience headwinds, and it's adjusting itself. The old way of doing business is no longer adequate for this industry. It's our job to provide AEC professionals with the tools they need to succeed. Our performance demonstrates that we're accomplishing this goal. I hope that, you know, perhaps I've given you a new perspective or a new lens to think about our broad-based spanned AEC business around the five components that I mentioned on the pyramid slide. Maybe I have given you a reason to understand why I'm so bullish on the prospects for growth in the future for our AEC business at Autodesk. With that said, let me stop and ask for any questions or comments from the audience. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, to ask your audio questions, you may press star one on your touch-tone telephone. Again, to ask your questions, you may press star one. Please stand by for your first question. We have a question from the line of Sterling Auty. You may proceed.
Yeah, thanks. Hi. I got bounced in and out. If you mentioned in your prepared remarks, I do apologize. What are you doing to help facilitate the adoption of the suites within this area in terms of the training or easing the migration into suites for the average user?
Thank you. Thanks for that question. It's a great question, actually, one that we thought a lot about. Frankly, we would have never executed against suites as a strategy, as an execution if we weren't prepared to migrate people into the suites and allow people to move data through the products in the suites. We've just started that process. We've worked very hard on a few different angles to facilitate that. First and foremost, we've started to create a similar user experience across products that are in suites and frankly across our whole portfolio.
That was a project that we kicked off a few years ago. You're starting to see that very clearly in the portfolio itself. There's not a foreign experience when you pop from one product to the other in the suites. The second thing we're doing is we're trying to move information across the products in the suites. Interoperability of information, of data, is critical to making the suites really effective for our users. We have not solved everything around that problem. We have lots of work to do there, but that's something that gets a lot of our investment and a lot of our time. The third thing we're doing is, it's not just around suites, but around the concept of building information modeling, for instance, in the AEC market.
We feel it's our responsibility to work with our channel partners, to work with our internal services people, and to create energy around the adoption of these products. We're doing that in a number of different ways. One, we are working with channel partners and their systems integration arms to really allocate consulting services and implementation services to customers as they change their workflow around BIM. The second thing we're doing is we're really trying to work with universities and higher education institutions to sort of get students to be better acclimated with the tools as they come into the workforce, which gives them a much better chance to use the next generation tools effectively in production right out the bat. Lots and lots of things are going on as initiatives in Autodesk to really drive it.
I think it's a very, very important thing and a very important area for us to continue to help our customers adopt these changed workflows. Thanks for the question.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, you may press star one to ask your question. We have a question that comes from the line of Michael [Faith]. You may proceed.
Yes, thank you very much. I have a question regarding the yearly release cycle of the products. One of the business challenges that we have in an organization of our size is dealing with different versions of products. While BIM is a great tool for helping us to provide our clients with a model that gives them the information throughout the lifecycle, it also puts up barriers between us, our consultants, and our clients in our ability to be able to use the different versions. Every year that Autodesk releases a new release, which is every 12 months, it puts up a barrier internally for us trying to determine how can we manage multiple versions of the same tool on the same workstation.
I guess my question is, how are you planning to deal with the issue of these boundaries that keep us from being able to really fully realize the benefits of BIM within our organization?
Thank you for the question. Let me cover that from a couple of angles. The first thing I would say is one of the things I think that has been one of the greatest changes at Autodesk over the last 10, 12 years is the movement to the annual release cycle for the sole reason that the amount of innovation that's going on in the technology teams and in our world around technology can't be accommodated in two and three-year cycles anymore.
It really is important, I think, that we continue to expose our innovation to those customers that wish to embrace new features, new functionality, but more importantly, new ways of managing data, new ways to visualize and simulate and analyze information, new methodologies that are moving very rapidly in terms of a lifecycle of change. I will say that. I also acknowledge that it is, in a production organization like probably yours, where you're trying to roll out technology and are big believers in the concepts of change process and the technologies, it is hard to move that ship quickly to the next release in 12-month increments. I do understand that, and I am sensitive to that. We're sort of somewhere caught in the middle. I don't think it's a wise idea for Autodesk to not do annual releases.
However, I do think that there are things we need to do to help you adopt it. I think part of the answer to the question before answers this question, which is how do we offer you services, training services, implementation services, process change services through our sales organization, through our consultants, through our resellers to equip you to make the change process release to release? The second thing is how do we, you know, and I think we're doing more and more of that. I think you should expect to see more of that. The second thing is we're using methodologies that have become sort of rote to computer users but weren't that way a few years ago.
Things like, you know, wide-scale video from, you know, that you pull down off of YouTube to understand how to implement these tools, how to use them more effectively, as opposed to reading training manuals or going through the arduous process of trial and error. You can learn best practices through lots of content that we're putting out through our training center and through our avenues at Autodesk to get you up to speed on that.
I think the last thing is we, as we continue to roll suites out, what we want to do is make sure that, you know, first of all, I think our subscription program has been one that has been very focused on allowing enterprises like yours to really be a part of a continuing deliverable around the releases and around interim things that we do around releases, but not feel like if you don't hop on the next release immediately or on your time, you feel like you're out of the program. I think subscription has been a really good thing for customers to be a part of, even if they don't move as quickly as we're releasing product from release to release.
It's a little bit of a, the answer is a little bit difficult because, you know, I don't think we'd be an innovative technology provider if we weren't moving faster than the market was able to accept our technology. With that said, I think it is incumbent upon Autodesk to help you accept that and implement it in your workflow. We're doing our best to try to do that from different angles.
Ladies and gentlemen, you may press star one to ask your audio questions. Press star one. To ask your audio questions, you may press star one on your touch-tone telephone. We have a question from the line of [Aksha Soars]. You may proceed.
Hi, it's Blair Abernethy of Stifel, Jay .
Hi there.
Hi. Just a quick question. Maybe you can expand a bit on how Vault or a hosted data management service will tie into BIM.
Sure. I think there are, so you specifically asked about the hosted data management service, and I think there's also sort of a behind-the-firewall data management implementation that we think will apply very deeply to BIM, especially at the enterprise or at the organizational level.
I'll just answer by making a comment first, which is probably the single biggest issue that I hear from my enterprise customers, my large-scale customers that are trying to manage lots and lots of building information models and information that informs the construction or infrastructure creation process is what can Autodesk do to help us manage the information, both from a behind-the-firewall perspective, but also from a mobile access, from a hosted service, etc. One of the things we've looked at is our own portfolio, which we have evolved over the last years. Vault, you know, it sounds like you're familiar with Vault. Vault was originally a manufacturing tool for PLM, if you will. There are so many things that are relevant to the way that that product line was architected, you know, that make it applicable to AEC after we've sort of manipulated and made it more AEC-centric.
We are now offering that as a core tool called, you know, Vault AEC or AEC Vault in our space. We also offer a Buzzsaw entitlement around it, which allows it to then communicate through a web service to allow for coordination through a hosted facility where the Buzzsaw interface interacts with the Vault implementation to communicate with the value chain, to communicate with the subcontractors and specialty contractors, etc. That's one way that you leverage information models and information behind the firewall into a hosted environment. I think ultimately, the power of the cloud and the power of web services will become so pervasive and are becoming so pervasive that people, you know, other organizations will be comfortable hosting all of their data in the cloud and leveraging it there, not on their servers, not behind their firewall.
We are very, you know, and we have tools that allow you to do that for construction management, through Constructware, for information management, through Buzzsaw. We are also innovating right now as we speak to really broaden that portfolio around and really coining it BIM 360. That's what I mean. If you're more interested in the concepts of BIM 360 and what makes it up, we can certainly follow up with you and let you know what that is. I think it's a really powerful idea in this industry today in terms of information sharing, information management, information coordination.
Great. Thank you.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, you may press star one to ask your audio question. At this time, sir, there are no other questions in the queue. I'll turn the call back over to Mr. David Gennarelli for closing remarks.
Thanks, Operator, and thanks, Jay, for doing the call today. If there's any follow-up questions, please contact me at 415-507-6033. Thanks again for joining us today.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your presentations. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.