Autodesk StudioWall

PRESENTER: Well, I'm excited to have a chance to talk to you about Studio Wall today. So I'm a product manager here at Autodesk. And I thought I would start out especially-- so I was in charge of curating the tracks for automotive this year. So I've been counting the numbers of all the classes. And interestingly enough, we had this very divergent number of registrations.

So we had, I think, five classes picked as the feature classes. And they're completely booked. And then, evidently, we really struggled to get publicity on all the other classes because there's very segregated attendance numbers. And so this was one of the ones that was not marketed quite as well. So that's something for us to learn next year.

But since it is so intimate, I thought I could take the excuse to get to know you a little bit better and start out with a bit of a personal introduction as far as why I feel so passionately about what we're doing to bring better collaboration data management tools to our customers. So before I jump into that, just a level set of what we'll be talking about today-- the key objectives. So by the end of the class, you'll be able to understand the benefits of having the right technology to support data management and collaboration in the design studio.

And then how different personas can make use of Studio Wall. So whether you're a designer, or an Alias modeler, or a CAS modeler, a manager. And then a critical piece for a lot of our customers is how Studio Wall interfaces with their data management systems.

So this is a product that's really targeted at design studios in automotive. And often, they have a very strong PLM system, whether that's NX or ENOVIA. And we have a really nice story about how Studio Wall serves the needs of designers while interfacing well with the PLM system.

But before we jump into that, a bit of the personal side of this. Do we have any Russian speakers in the room? You need a bigger sample size for this. So this is [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]. And that's how you say "good day" in Russian.

And about 10 years ago, I was taking a break from my studies of economics at Brigham Young University. And I was living in Saint Petersburg, Russia, pursuing a minor in Russian. It was just a beautiful experience. I was learning the six ways to conjugate Russian verbs-- and the type of thing that I just was glad I did that while I was young, because there's no way I'd have a chance to do this now.

But while I was there, my dad happened to be a world famous computer scientist. And he had just invented what he considered to be the breakthrough discovery of his 25 years of research in computer graphics. It's a technology called T-splines. So my dad's been honored at SIGGRAPH with its Lifetime Achievement Award. He won the Pierre Bezier award.

And T-splines, he just felt was finally the technology that he wanted to really push into being used. I don't know how many of you have fingers in academia. But a common frustration there is that you invent something amazing and then it just sits. And no one ever actually has their life made better by it through commercialization.

So he thought, well, let's push this into industry and make sure that this actually blesses people's lives. And so he attracted the attention of a lot of local entrepreneurs. And they wanted to found a company with him.

But he had higher aspirations. He remembered how he and I had success working together when I was young with my paper route and with a rental house. And he thought that that was a good enough justification that we should start a company together.

So he had me start his company. He remained as a professor. We hired his grad students. And we started a company. And we made a product. It was called T-splines. And we made the software for-- this has actually since been acquired by Autodesk. It's the technology in Fusion 360 for the free-form stuff.

But our beginnings were much more humble. Because with all the good programmers that we had, I could not find within the radius of our office any good designer that I could afford that could do anything at all with the technology. And so since we still had to come up with demo materials, that job fell to me since I was the only non-programmer. And I had spent my whole life avoiding art classes, because I thought I would fail them. So this was the best I could do. And I don't think it really made the technology sing.

And so it put our little company, really, at risk. Because we didn't have that key talent. And then one day, completely out of the blue, I got this email from a young, poor Argentine college student named Juan who said that he had a pirated copy of T-splines. And he sent me a couple copies of models that he had made and wondered if there was any way we can work out some exchange where he could get a legal copy of the software. And the models that he sent me were far and away the best T-splines models that I had ever seen, especially from my point of view with my experience. And so that began this collaboration that continues to this day.

So how we would work is Juan's English was very poor. And so we'd communicate largely over Skype text because that was easier for him. And so I'd get these requests from customers for how to-- challenges they were after. And then I would communicate with him over Skype.

We'd make tutorials. And then we would make these models. And largely just on the strength of this one poor guy, our company rose from obscurity into being highly used by large firms all across the world in architecture, toys, consumer products, jewelry, and then ultimately was acquired by Autodesk.

So if you can just imagine with me how my life would be different if my circle of collaboration had been limited to just people I could afford within 10 miles of my house. Our company probably would have died. And I wouldn't be here. But that's just some of the power of global collaboration.

And I know that that story that I've shared is really not very unique. Each of you has global collaborators that maybe you rarely if ever see in person that you collaborate with online. So Juan-- we collaborated for years before we ever met. We've only met twice. Yeah. Everything was just done over Skype.

But there's a lot of companies that work this way now. So Basecamp is just one of my favorite examples. So they were formally called 37signals. And they famously have all their employees completely distributed. And they feel so passionately about the benefits of a distributed workforce.

They wrote a book on it called Remote. And in that, they just come up with a lot of truisms that I've learned from my own experience and you know as well, such as the most talented people in the world don't live all in one place. And going remote allows the most talented people to produce the best work, regardless of location.

So the industry that we're focused on, automotive, understands that really well. Most of the large car companies have designed studios distributed across the world to pull on good talent and design trends. And so from Autodesk's standpoint, really, our role is to help facilitate that collaboration among team members, regardless of location-- where they're at.

So the issue, though, is even though you can communicate over long distances, that doesn't mean that you can necessarily collaborate effectively. So going back again to my example with Juan-- since everything we did over it was over Skype, I was just really sloppy on process.

So we even agreed to contract terms in Skype chat. And then I was audited years later. And it was a really costly mistake. Because Skype chat disappears after awhile. So we had no record of our contract terms. And so I learned in a very painful way how important it is to have technology to really support the process that you're after.

So other challenges that you may share as customers is security levels. Because you're trying to collaborate with people. How do you have the appropriate level of security, especially if you involve contractors in the mix, without making copies of redundant data? How can you tell what is the single source of truth? What's the latest actual final version of a file? Even if you have a good process, do you have the right technology in place to actually get you where you want to go?

And then finally-- this is maybe the most challenging one for a lot of our customers-- is how would you appeal to the digital native generation? So this was a term coined about in 2001 by someone named Marc Prensky, an education consultant. And his definition of a digital native is "children raised in a digital, media-saturated world, who require a media-rich learning environment to hold their attention." And the definition of anyone in that generation is anyone born after 1980. That makes the rest of us digital immigrants.

But the challenge, again, with most of our automotive customers is how do they retain that top talent who is really excited-- I think Carl Bass talked about that in our opening presentation. How do you compete with companies like Facebook or others that are really hip? And the key is to give them the tools that they're expecting. And those expectations are higher than what the digital immigrants have.

So from Autodesk's standpoint, we're investing a lot in what we call the collaboration of the future. And there's a lot of parts of this. You'll see classes across AU about a lot of these topics, like cloud, mobile, augmented reality-- if you've been able to check out the HoloLens demo-- collaborative design.

But what I'm going to talk about today is really the foundation, at least, from an automotive standpoint, which is visual data management. So this is the foundation of how you manage the data during the design process. And with that, I'm going to switch out of PowerPoint and actually jump into the product that we're talking about today, Studio Wall, and continue this presentation as a live demo of that. So let's jump in.

All right. So this has logged me out by now because of security settings. So I'll just go ahead and log out and log back in. So Studio Wall-- it runs in a browser. But all of the data lies behind your firewall. So this Vault data set is in Toronto in one of our offices. And so I'm just running it through the internet here.

But what it is-- it's a visual representation of your data. And then it allows you to also have all the benefits of data management that a robust PDM system like Vault gives you. So you can sort things by projects. I set up a project here for my Studio Wall demo. And you can view a lot of assets in here.

So one of the assets you can view is a PDF file. So that's what we'll jump to immediately just to finish out the presentation part of this. And then we'll go into more of a interactive demo of Studio Wall.

So some of the reasons why our customers are interested in a product like Studio Wall is just the drivers that affect every business decision that they make. They all seem to update new models of car designs, expand their range, be able to customize, do bespoke releases of cars. And there's always challenges to achieving those business drivers. Among those is just that the project complexity just continues to go up. There's more and more inputs to the modeling process that need to be juggled and the stakeholders that need to be kept informed.

And what we've seen as we've talked with a lot of our customers is that they have a process that they need to follow. They have people that they've trained. But there's not a good technology to support that process. And what that leads to is costly loss of time.

The other challenge that our customers have-- and again, this mainly is talking about interfacing with the expectations that the digital native generation has. And frankly, all of us-- when we're at home, we can use Google Image Search. Pull up a very nice user experience when we're looking for images. Then we go to work and our choices are navigating a file system or using a data management system built for engineers, neither of which is inspiring and, frankly, is much harder to use when you're doing a very visual process.

So that's the driver of Studio Wall is to help you manage your data so you can actually be more creative, instead of losing time to be creative. An interesting thing, again, about this area-- again, with my background in T-splines and technology, it's all really cool technology. And it's exciting to explore possibilities. But with Studio Wall, it's just a very, I think, simple and, in a way, boring value proposition. It just helps you save time.

So we've done this with a lot of customers. We do what's called business process assessments, where we just take a look and see how much time do they spend searching for data, recreating lost data, or just manually filling out things that could be automated. And as we've done that across a number of customers, what we've come across with is a consistent answer that, in a midsize car design studio, in general, about two designer man-years are lost each year just from time-- this adds up. If you spend 15 minutes a day searching for data over the course of a year, that's just a lot of time.

So where we're at in the process of Studio Wall is we have a broad vision for this product being used for data management, social collaboration, and project management. And where we're at today is we have this data management solution available. And we've done some neat work with prototypes for the other stuff that we can show you later if you'd like to as well.

But this solution of data management-- it's based on these really mature Autodesk components. So one of these is Vault, which ships with most Autodesk suites. It's been tested by over 100,000 users worldwide. And it's very performant. And a key part for a lot of our customers is this loads behind your firewall. So if there's some conservatism around data in the cloud, this is the solution today that can really get around that while giving you a good user experience.

So let me jump out of this PDF now and jump into actually how Studio Wall is used by a number of different personas in the design studio to augment and improve their workflows. So here's the four key personas we'll be focusing on. The first one is designers.

The key benefits of Studio Wall for designers-- there's five of them. It gives you the chance to have both privacy and collaboration-- both of which are important early in the design process-- a single source of truth, strong integration with your sketching applications, a non-intrusive data management, and then the ability to visually search for data.

So let's walk through a day in the life of a designer and how he might use Studio Wall. So the first thing, I guess, before it comes to the designer is just setting up a new project in Studio Wall. And this is really simple. Anyone with authorization can do this.

First of all, when you log into Studio Wall, it leverages your Active Directory. So you don't have to manage a separate password. And then it also inherits the permissions from that Active Directory. So all that can be set up either there or inside a Vault. And that's reflected in Studio Wall.

So you just create a new project. You can determine the status of that-- if it's something in progress, or done, or not started yet-- and the dates of the project. I've already created a project for us here. It's this Seat project.

And so in here, I can view all the files that have been added. I have the option-- some of our customers like only just viewing this as flat data. We also have folders that you can show visibility on or not. And one of the values of these folders is, again, how we had the different varying levels of permission.

So if you're early in the design process-- if I'm Michael, I'll be able to see all of the data inside of my folder. But Sal or Rich-- I couldn't see anything inside of there. Because I don't have the appropriate permissions to see what they're doing.

The other thing that we have is the common inspiration folders. This is common in car design, that before you start a project, you'll just put together some inspirational images that you want to be directing the emotion of the design. And so here's what I have to start out for the Seat project. And maybe I want to add a few more. And adding files to Studio Wall is very simple.

I was really inspired by the dream catcher demos at Autodesk University. So I found this image. You just drag and drop it. And then you can assign that to the project. So let's see. This is in the Seat project. Optionally, you can assign it to a folder. So here's the inspiration folder.

And then the way that data is organized is you have a chance to set up things so that it's either a mandatory field to fill out or a custom tag to fill out. So we decided a few mandatory fields. These are completely customizable by any customer. What we've added here is to determine the state. So I'll say this is a work in progress. And then the asset type. This is an image.

And then I can also add any custom tags as well. So I'm going to say inspiration. I'll say Matt because that's my name. And I'll say Las Vegas because this is where I found this beautiful inspiration. You can add a comment as well. And then that uploads that up to that folder. And now you see that's been added to my inspiration.

So you can change how this is displayed as well. So we have customers that are looking to replace the printouts of mood boards on their walls and just have 4K displays. And that can be driven by Studio Wall by just having large examples of these inspirational images.

So once I have this inspiration, I kind of know what I'm going after. Then I can start a sketch. So let me come back over. And I'll be assuming the role of Michael. Let me change this back. And what I can do is start by launching an application directly from Studio Wall. And you can do that a few ways.

One way is what I've done is created a sketch template. And what this template lets me do is have any settings that I want on that file assigned or also any tags already assigned to that, so they can be associated in the right way with this project. So now I launch this template file. And what it's doing is automatically downloading that and then launching my sketching application. This takes some of the pain out of data management by doing that behind the scenes so that you just-- it's just a natural way of working.

So what I'll do is do a cooking show approach. Start my sketch here. So here's what I've imported. I can add any additional parts to the sketch to highlight any parts of the seat. And then when I save this back to Studio Wall, it just saves back naturally.

So I just say-- I'll go ahead and save that. I have the chance to enter a comment. So I'll say AU demo. And then this logs back into Studio Wall. And then I have a version history of everything that I've done on this file. So upload successful.

And then if I just refresh the screen, you'll see that that template now reflects this new thumbnail of the sketch that I made. So here's this new sketch that I did. I can double-click that and see the preview. And here's the versions history that I've done and just, yeah, how that process has unfolded.

So that's how you can interact with a sketching application. I guess the other thing that I can do, as well, is once I've done this, I can update different parts of the asset. By clicking Update the Asset, I can change the name of this. So I can say, Matt demo. And then I can also change any of the tags.

So this is all the tags that it inherited by basing it off that template. So initial sketches, AU, seat, Matt, Las Vegas. And this is all helpful for the search workflows we'll show later.

OK. So once I've got a sketch that I'm happy with, I can go ahead and submit that for review to my boss. So what I'll do here is I'll-- this is a sketch that I've worked some more on. And you can see there's been a lot of variations here. And I can track these here in the side. So you see, here are some green ones. Here are some yellow ones. Here are some purple ones.

And maybe after I've done all this sketching and designs-- sometimes an iterative process. And you decide, actually, at the end of the day, this purple one is really my favorite one. So I can flag that and say, this is the one I want to submit for review. And so once I've done that, I can come in here and say that I want to go ahead and update this and change the state of this asset and say, go from work in progress to submitting this for review. And what that does is that changes who has visibility into this object.

So now if I'm a manager, I can come in here. And maybe I don't have access to all of the files that Michael's done in his own private thing. But especially if he moves this out of his private thing-- he can go click and just drag over and land here in the seat. And then I change the state.

So I have this filter. So I'm only seeing things that are ready for review. So as a manager, my view is relatively uncluttered. Then I say, oh, OK. Here's the seat design exploration. Now I need to come in here and make a decision on whether this is good enough.

So I can come in here and look at that. And I can say, actually, I'm going to give you some feedback back. I'm going to say this isn't quite good enough. I'm going to send this back to work in progress. Or actually, maybe this is good. I'm going to send this to released. I can just say, great job. And then this will come into released and be ready for the next stage of the process for my Alias modeler to pick it up.

So if I'm a design lead as well, I can also set different filters so that I can be flagged and see this data better. So I can turn off the folders if all I want to see is data. And I also have this calendar search. So I can just have a running saved search, like I only want to see things that are in the Seat category for review that were done by my team in the last week. And that will just change the filter there.

And then I can create a bookmark so they can come back to that in the future. So it can just be last week's sketches. And so then I don't have to be playing with all those filters each time. I can just come here in the bookmark and say my last week's sketches.

Or here's one I set up previously. Alias last week. So you can see, as I change those different bookmarks, it's a different saved search. So there's different tags that are flagged and whatnot. This is a very powerful thing of Studio Wall to save time and help you track views that are of interest to you.

After I do that, I can go ahead and just refresh all the filters and come back to my original setting of Studio Wall. And go back into the-- actually, before I go back into the Seat project, let's come back to the AU Studio Wall project and look and see what CAS modelers can get out of the Studio Wall.

So those are the benefits the designer got out. Now let's see how Studio Wall can benefit CAS modelers. So they get clarity on the latest sketches and package data, integration with modeling applications, versioning, and then, again, the non-intrusive data management and visual search.

So let's pick things up from an Alias modeler's perspective and go back into that Seat project and say, OK, I'm ready to model. So let me see what has been released. So I can use that as an input to my data. OK, great. Here's this sketch.

So there's a few things I can do. One, I can just download this and say I want to use that in Alias. Or I can use that same template approach that I was using with my sketchbook approach. So here's this Alias template file. Let me edit this with Alias. Open this up. And then this downloads this. And it gets me all ready with the right metadata label for the Seat project.

So when I open this up, I've downloaded that seat that I can import into Alias. Let me change this to the left side. Go ahead and import that canvas image. And that's just in my downloads. And so I can use this as reference data.

But perhaps the more interesting thing is being able to not make duplicate copies of your data and be able to access data directly from Studio Wall. So if I want to import an Alias file to start out with, then this is brand new functionality that's actually still in-- it's not quite yet released. But I can actually see Studio Wall as a local directory on my computer. So I can access all of my projects through here.

So I can come into the Seat project, look at the Alias data, and not need to make a separate copy of that data directly to my local folder, but just import this data directly from there. So that aspiration that we have to have a single source of the truth with our data model-- that works here now in Studio Wall. Because I've not made any extra copies of this. And I just pulled that into my Alias file. So I can continue to model on that. But I'm just going to go ahead and exit that now. Save this back to Studio Wall.

And now I've been able to create this initial seat model referencing the sketch, referencing other data inside of Studio Wall without making any duplicate copies. So it's loading back in now. And the other interesting thing is we can do some customizable thumbnails of our data in Studio Wall as well.

So you notice this is labeled Alias template file. And that's just for me to be able to reference that easily. But now that I've used that, I'd rather have a graphical preview of this file. So if I go ahead and hit F5 to refresh this, then I can set the thumbnail so that it's actually reflecting what my scene looks like.

So I'll go ahead and update this asset and say, actually, I want to have the original file. And then that will show me the preview of what that file actually looks like. So again, that's a key part of the value is being able to see the actual 3D model. And now anyone with the appropriate permission, including my manager, can see the file at this point.

So let's jump back and talk about another persona with Studio Wall-- and that's the manager-- and see what benefits he can get out of Studio Wall. So for him, the key things here is a single source of the truth. Access to 3D data-- so a common issue with managers is that some of these applications, like Alias, are really difficult to drive. They require a lot of clutch keys that non-experts don't necessarily know how to use. And so with Studio Wall, they can get as much visibility into this 3D data as they would have with a physical clay model on their shop floor.

So let's go back into our Seat project. And here I'm going to use another feature of Studio Wall, the search bar, to search for a specific file. Here's this file, this manager demo wire. So if I double-click that, I have a 3D viewer inside Studio Wall so that the manager can get insight into what this 3D file looks like. Again, this is extremely valuable. I'm just dragging with my finger. And I can see, really, what this looks like without having set up a separate design review meeting.

There's a lot of features in this viewer. One is just this model browser. So I can isolate things. If I want to isolate and look at the headrest, I can do that, for instance. And there's a lot of other features here as well.

That's one of the things that modelers do with Studio Wall. Another, obviously, is being able to approve files, like we already showed with the sketch. Two other things I'll just point out is being able to compare data. So if I reset this filter-- and there's two files that have been sent to me for approval that are quite similar. I can just go ahead and say, let me just select two of them at once and say compare.

I can look at them side by side. And I can even overlay them. So if there is subtle differences, I can look at the pitch of one seat versus another and just see that on top of each other and see if that impacts my opinion of the design or the sketch.

The final thing that managers can do with Studio Wall is also view movies. So we support a lot of data inside Studio Wall-- not just design data. And so one movie I'll just show now is one showing how Studio Wall can be also used integrated with VRED Server. So this is something that's sold separately. But it's available today with Studio Wall. And this turns Studio Wall into just a data management tool and then to, really, a presentation tool.

So I just showed the current 3D view that we have in Studio Wall, which is the lower fidelity preview. You can also hook up VRED Server to Studio Wall and get a high quality real-time raytraced version of your models as well. This is very customizable. So this is just one way that the interface can look like.

But when you're in a design review session, this is really powerful to not have to make separate copies of your data from your computer to a jump drive to the other machine. But if everything's lying on that server, you can access it through whether you're at your own machine, prep up until the last second, and then go into the design review room and drive that with VRED Server.

Managers can also archive data. And then finally, they can also-- the other important thing for managers is knowing that the data we create in Studio Wall can connect to your PDM system. So what we just finished commercializing is a connection to some middleware called Open PDM.

The reason why this is valuable is that, with this middleware, we can connect from Studio Wall to really any PDM system, including Teamcenter and ENOVIA. And so if you have your engineering data that resides in a different PLM system, there can be a seamless interaction with Studio Wall. You can pull data in, pull package data in, send data out to that PLM system. And that's just the critical part of the data flow process with managing data with Studio Wall.

So the final group we'll talk about that benefits from Studio Wall is contractors. And this is a thorny one with a lot of studios is that, especially today, there's often a large percentage of a studio that's actually a contractor. And so some of the companies we work with end up making duplicate copies of almost all their data. Because contractors just can't have access to everything. So they have the separate volume for contractors. And there's always duplicate copies.

But with Studio Wall, you can just give access to specific files, or specific folders, or specific projects to contractors. You never have to make a duplicate copy of your data. And it all resides within that single source of truth.

So if those are the key personas that Studio Wall can be used by, let's just talk about the final thing that everyone does with Studio Wall. And that's searching for older data. So there's a lot of ways to do this. And we've shown how this gets set up by the tags that you apply when you upload files to Studio Wall. But we have, again, the required tags and then the custom tags.

These required tags mean that, whatever the project is, you can set a state and say, I only want to see everything that's work in progress that is an asset type that's an image. And it can filter along that and help you find the data. Even when you're filtered by that, then you have the search bar that you can type in additional letters. And it just brings up anything that is currently visible on the screen. So you can pull up additional assets like that.

While you're searching, sometimes it's beneficial to look at assets as an image. Sometimes it's beneficial to look at them in a list view. So you can change to a list view as well and then sort by the date modified, by the size-- just the things that you'd expect to do in Windows Explorer as well.

And then I think the most powerful thing is these custom tags. So I'll go ahead and reset all of those filters and just pull up the custom tags. And here, these are all the tags that anyone associated with my projects have applied. So I can apply just a single tag. So I can just apply the concepts tag and see what we have here. Let me change this back to the gallery view.

I can also add labels. So sometimes if it's difficult to tell the difference between one object and another, it's helpful to have the words. And then I can apply multiple tags as well. So let me get out of that and just say, I'll search for the custom tag AU. And when I type one, then it shows everything that starts with an A. So I'll just select AU. And then if I also want to say, OK, everything AU that's also done in Alias speed form and that's also done in VRED-- you can apply multiple tags at once to really filter down on a specific level.

And then the other way you can filter is just by file types as well. So in addition to tags, you have all these file types. So if you're only looking for, say, Alias wire data, you can say, I only want to find that. If you want wire data and also speed form data, you can add speed form to that as well. So just a very rich way of sorting and finding data through Studio Wall.

So the final thing I'll do before opening time up for questions is just add an invitation. So here up in the front is Sal Bondi, who is one of the principal user experience designers on Studio Wall. And he has an opportunity-- and maybe you could even introduce this yourself, Sal-- what the opportunity is to talk with you more about this product.

SAL BONDI: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Matt. We have [INAUDIBLE] on the third floor. There's two [INAUDIBLE] So we have tables there, where you come and I'll run you through a demo, answer some questions, and show you a little bit more in detail. Also, so in future, we're posed for [INAUDIBLE] resource management, [INAUDIBLE] charts. So I'll show you some of that.

You'll get a $25 gift certificate for a half hour of your time at Amazon. And then you'll also be entered at the end of the day, we give away [INAUDIBLE] Just come back at 6 o'clock, we'll wrap [INAUDIBLE]. It's really just a way for us to build relationships with the user experience. And I'll be there from 2:30 to 6:00 this afternoon in half-hour increments. So if you would like, [INAUDIBLE] spending some time together.

PRESENTER: Cool. Good. Well, thank you very much for coming to this class today. This has been something that I've been looking forward to as we've been developing this product throughout the year. And I hope that insight into Studio Wall and how that can assist in data management and collaboration can really open up new avenues for your organization to become more effective and especially manage your design better-- data better. So thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

Yeah, I think we've got some time for questions.

AUDIENCE: How will this be offered. Is it part of a suite or a bundle of some sort, or is it a standalone program?

PRESENTER: Yeah, so right now it's a standalone program-- a standalone product. So it's just on the Autodesk price list. Yep.

AUDIENCE: Is there a-- if you want to demo it, is that something that's available?

PRESENTER: Yeah, so you can demo it as well. Demoing PLM software is a little bit more involved than demoing content creation software. But we have-- there's two different levels. We can get you access to an online hosted sandbox. Or more hands on-- we can involve our consulting team and help--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: Yep. That's probably the best way to test out the user experience. Yep. Cool. Any other questions?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: Sure. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] So it exports out into SharePoint or whatever other data management [INAUDIBLE] I had?

PRESENTER: Yeah, so the way that works is you go through this middleware. It's a third party called Open PDM. Sharepoint's not one that I've been focused on myself. So I don't know if that is specifically supported. But there's a wide variety of PDM systems that are--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] And I see that's just becoming available this month.

PRESENTER: Yeah, so Studio Wall is available now. And that middleware is available, I think, as of next week.

AUDIENCE: That will be part of the software package, or is that an additional--

PRESENTER: It's sold separately. Because we're resellers of that bit. So that's the middleware.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: Yeah, so that's always been a key part of our vision with Studio Wall, is that resource management and the collaboration. And we were pretty far along the path of spec'ing that out for the product. And then about a year ago, Autodesk acquired a really interesting company called Shotgun that does the same thing for media and entertainment.

So we spent the last few months working closely with that team to really learn from them and their experience about how they do collaboration and project management for media and entertainment. And now we're at the point where that's basically been our prototype. And now we're moving forward with development and getting that into Studio Wall. So that's on our near-term roadmap for the next year.

SAL BONDI: And that's something that I could share [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: Yes, Sal's got some really nice prototypes on that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So [INAUDIBLE] 2:30 or two o'clock is when you start the--

SAL BONDI: Yeah, it's all day. I'm in a few other classes. But I'm going to be there from 2:30 to 6:00 in half hour increments. So [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: Cool. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: How does this integrate with Vault, exactly? [INAUDIBLE] or is it similar to Vault?

PRESENTER: Yeah, so that's a great question. So in a way, this is kind of a visual front-end for Vault. So Vault's a really nice product. It's targeted at a slightly different target than Studio Wall is. It's targeted at engineers. And so we've actually had some of our customers that need a data management solution so much that they've gone ahead and implemented Vault. And it works just fine.

But no designers really want to use it. Because it's foreign from their way of working. It's not visual. So this is really a visual front-end on Vault. We're exposing the Vault functionality. And then we've added some additional things as well. But the idea is to get all the benefits of Vault and that security and the benefits of data management just in a way that is seamlessly integrated with your design way of thinking and your design process.

AUDIENCE: Because we were meeting with Autodesk, basically, last year talking about Vault, which we purchased

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

AUDIENCE: --implemented yet. And some of our-- we were also talking about reviewing some design content that we do on iPads.

PRESENTER: Oh, yeah.

AUDIENCE: That was like the workflow we were talking about. And that's where they mentioned Studio Wall. So I'm trying to figure out-- trying to remember, first of all, how we got to talking about Studio Wall and how that would help our workflow is putting just over top of Vault, which we haven't implemented either. So just trying to figure--

PRESENTER: Yeah. Yeah, we could talk about that. We do have-- for instance, we have one customer that was excited about Studio Wall. It wasn't ready yet. So they did buy Vault and implemented it. And I think their experience is Vault's great. And this is just-- for what they're doing, it's just a better interface and a better experience.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, because I'm involved with store design. And we do renderings and layout and different design iterations. So comparing the [INAUDIBLE], comparing the differences.

PRESENTER: Yeah, I'd be happy to chat with you afterwards and see what we can figure out for you as well.

AUDIENCE: Is there any limit to the size of files you can upload [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: We've tested up to 3-gigabyte. Because that's what our customers care about. But beyond that, I just haven't tested.

AUDIENCE: But [INAUDIBLE] accepted, it may--

PRESENTER: Yeah, there's not a hard limit I'm aware of. It's just that's what we functionally tested to. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So if you know [INAUDIBLE] processor, how easy is it to [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: That's a good question. Usually our demo-- I don't happen to have Photoshop on my computer. But that's usually our demo is showing it with Photoshop and other third parties. So whenever you [INAUDIBLE] on an asset, then it gives you a prompt of what you want to edit that with. And so this is customizable by the user.

But here's our marking menu. And so if it's a wire file, it says we can edit that with Alias. But if I pull up a Photoshop file, then it will say, do you want to edit that with Photoshop or Sketchbook Pro? So you can just basically add whatever applications you want to integrate with. And that's the nice thing about how we've done this integration, especially with this connected desktop in the background where you can see Studio Wall as a local directory on your machine.

It gets really expensive and costly to maintain integrations with however many applications any customer has. But by exposing Studio Wall as a local directory, we don't have to maintain those integrations. It's just available. The data is available to interact with those applications so that you can just save back and forth seamlessly.

Great. Well, thanks for coming. I can stick around for a while if there's any more questions. But thanks for your interest today.

[APPLAUSE]