Autodesk Plus Egnyte: A Powerful Pairing for AEC Firms

AARON VORWERK: Welcome, everyone, to our session today, Autodesk Plus Egnyte-- A Powerful Pairing for AEC Firms. My name is Aaron. And I'll be guiding us through this presentation. But I have a lot help today coming from two of our customers, Brad Buckles from Charles Perry Partners and Greg Klein from Power Design, as well as my colleague, Kevin Leatham, from our AEC product team here at Egnyte. I'll get to those folks later. But I want to walk us through a little bit of the context around this topic today.

I'll start today by explaining a little bit about how these platforms are complementary to each other-- Autodesk Construction Cloud, which I'm sure all of you know, and Egnyte, which maybe a good number of the audience is getting to know, as well-- and how they work together to support projects and businesses. And then we'll get into the mechanics of how that works. ACC Connect-- what is that? What does it mean? How does it work?

Then we'll get to the meat of the presentation, in some respects, because we'll have customers who are mutually using Autodesk tools and Egnyte, talk a little bit about their use cases and maybe what they'd like to see us do next. And then that'll be Kevin's turn to come on to the mic and talk to us a little bit about where we're investing in deepening these workflows between Autodesk Construction Cloud and Egnyte. So that's the lay of the land. And with that, let's jump into the first topic.

Autodesk Construction Cloud plus Egnyte-- complementary platforms for AEC firms. You likely know that Autodesk is a global leader in AEC project software. Now, I work for Egnyte. But I did work for Autodesk in the past and have seen both sides of this story. But if we focus on Autodesk for a second, we're talking about a global leader in design applications used by architecture and engineering firms around the world, particularly strong in the building segment-- so vertical infrastructure-- but also a company that has invested significantly over probably the last 15 years or so in building out construction-focused workflows.

There was some specific benefits to-- even to their design, customers with things like Revit Cloud Worksharing and enhancing collaboration, but also building out those end user field coordination workflows over time. And so Autodesk is a major player in the AEC space. That might be telling you stuff that you already know.

But no company solves every problem. In the case of Autodesk and what Autodesk does, Egnyte is not an alternative. Egnyte does not displace those end user-focused tools, whether that's at the point of creation and ideation or if it's at the point of field coordination. A lot of that stuff is really Autodesk's lane.

Likewise, Autodesk doesn't offer general-purpose business software. It's not where you would run your firm. It doesn't offer an alternative to traditional IT infrastructure or data governance. That is a different lane.

And so when we're talking about Autodesk's focus, Autodesk is very strong in authoring, collaboration, and coordination at the point of design or the point of construction, whereas Egnyte is something different. Egnyte is offering a turnkey platform for running a business that offers an answer to traditional IT tools, but offers data governance, content lifecycle management, compliance, many other capabilities that are needed to run a firm. And in fact, this is what we're going to be focusing on today-- is the fact that these platforms do have overlap.

Autodesk has file storage in Docs, part of their unified platform. Egnyte, of course, offers file storage, yes, at a point of low value. These platforms have some overlap. But in reality, the places where they are strong are very different and highly complementary, and both necessary to cover the full scope of an AEC business needs.

And coming back to today's talk, ACC Connect is really the tool right now, the middleware based on Workato, that makes these platforms talk to each other, and at the present time. So one way I like to remember it-- we're talking about these things-- is run your projects wherever you need. If that's Autodesk Construction Cloud, run your projects using that portfolio of tools from Autodesk. But run your business on Egnyte. And that tells you everything you need to know in one statement-- that these are two different things, but yet they talk to each other.

So that's the backdrop to why we even have these conversations, why we're dealing with this session and this topic here at Autodesk University. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about ACC Connect. So this is the front end for a tool, a platform called Workato. And that is used to integrate with Egnyte.

So we have three pieces to this puzzle. And to be clear, Autodesk Construction Cloud is a portfolio of tools. There is a unified platform of tools that you're probably know-- Docs, BIM Collaborate Pro, Build, et cetera-- that talk to each other. And then there are other pieces of Autodesk Construction Cloud, such as BuildingConnected and so on, that are separate pieces to this product grouping. And actually, we connect to more than just the unified platform through this integration.

And then we have Egnyte, this platform that we represent, myself and Kevin. Think of this as, again, turnkey IT infrastructure for a business and a lot more than that. But that's a simple explanation. And then Workato, which is a middleware, a very interesting solution that allows hundreds of different platforms, including Autodesk Construction Cloud and Egnyte, to talk to each other-- so a way of moving data between these platforms without having to necessarily get under the hood of the APIs for these softwares, but rather no-code/low-code recipes that can be stitched together.

What does that look like here? And why do we call this thing ACC Connect? So Autodesk side of this integration with Workato is branded as ACC Connect-- or whitelisted, you might say. And this is something that Autodesk has chosen to develop. And what they're doing is, over time, taking parts of their Autodesk Platform Services APIs and bringing them into this Workato-- their side of the Workato integration such that more and more pieces of Autodesk Construction Cloud can be connected to other tools.

And then Egnyte has an interesting story. We don't develop and sell a Egnyte Connect version. In fact, you'll just find Egnyte widgets inside of Workato because we have a long history of working with Workato that was actually initiated by PlanGrid prior to PlanGrid's acquisition by Egnyte. So we have two sides of this, all accessible through app.workato.com if you have access to the ACC Connect tools available through Autodesk.

And then you're seeing screenshots. I'm going to try to avoid-- I'm very tempted to switch to a demo. But I'm going to try to avoid that for purposes of time today. You can stitch together, essentially, recipes, little widgets that you pull in that are from BIM 360 or from the ACC platform or from Egnyte or other tools. And you, essentially, use these as triggers and then instructions of moving data back and forth between the platforms.

What might we need to move between these platforms? Well, we could be starting on either side. For example, an Egnyte user might be collecting reality capture data due to our integrations with various scanning tools and photogrammetry tools. And when it's time to use that information in a specific project, then an integration via ACC Connect would allow us to populate that into the right project over in Autodesk Construction Cloud.

And then conversely, and I think this is something Greg will share in a few minutes, a very common use case on the other side, going the other way, is to take, let's say, Revit data or other author data-- Civil 3D, maybe-- and push that over as a copy to Egnyte at regular intervals. And that could be for any number of reasons. It could be a secondary backup, it could be for purposes of legal and compliance reasons to move certain files into a certain place so that data governance can be applied to them, or it could simply be that there are users outside of the Autodesk Construction Cloud ecosystem that need access to those files.

And it's-- makes it easy to free that up and make Egnyte the Switzerland in that scenario. And so either way, we can be moving data. And we can move data back and forth in an operation if we needed to based on the triggers that we put in place.

Now, I want to step away from that just for a second. There are other features inside of the integration discussion. For example, one can embed an Egnyte UI, the-- basically, the entirety of the Egnyte web experience inside of Autodesk Construction Cloud's web experience through Autodesk's partner cards. It's just, essentially, a portal that allows for embedding web code HTML into Autodesk Construction Cloud's various dashboards.

What that actually does, though, while it's not complex to do and so on-- what that does is allow the users, the end users who don't really know what's all happening behind the scenes, to access all of their content, no matter where it's sitting, from a familiar environment. So there are other mechanisms here besides this data transfer back and forth that we're focusing on today.

So circling back, there are many use cases. I gave you a couple of those already. And I want to get the floor turned over to Greg and Brad to talk about their use cases and ideas. But just to throw one more out there, this is something that we were-- this is not a specific image I'm talking about, but just this idea of how we might have various touchpoints between these platforms.

Perhaps a user is working on completing some kind of form. Maybe it's some kind of report that they're tracking in the field that requires a signature. Maybe they already have Egnyte Sign or, inside of Egnyte, they have Adobe Sign or Docusign turned on because those are also integrations. But they can push a button, send that document over. Maybe it gets signed inside of Egnyte and another recipe sends it back so that it is tracked on the ACC side as having been completed. But in the meantime, that signed form is now in some kind of folder that meets legal requirements and retention requirements over in Egnyte.

So there are many possibilities like that. It's hard to conceptualize until the need actually arises inside of a company. And so for that reason, we have created the tools. But we want to hear from customers who actually use this stuff. And maybe they can point us in the direction that we need to go and then have Kevin talk a little bit about how we've been thinking about that.

So with that, I want to turn the floor over first to Greg at Power Design to introduce himself and his firm and talk about how they use Egnyte today. And then we'll come back and get to Brad. So Greg, you're up.

GREGORY KLEIN: Thanks, Aaron. So hello, everyone. My name is Gregory Klein. I am a software engineer at Power Design. I am primarily the lead for development related to pre-constructed initiatives, including integrations we built with ACC. Power Design is a multi-trade contractor. As an electrical contractor, we are one of the largest in the country. We specialize in multifamily, student housing, and hospitality. And we offer both design and build services across trades, including electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and systems technologies.

To give a little bit of background, Power Design adopted Egnyte in 2020. It is our core file storage and sharing service. At the time, we were work sharing our Revit models over the network. When we made the transition to Egnyte, we shortly-- shortly after, we decided to migrate our central models and backgrounds to BIM 360.

Now, given the critical nature of this content, this raised the concern over data recovery. How could we ensure that we have backups of our Revit models in the event of a disaster? To address this, we built an integration to back up our files to ACC-- to Egnyte-- from ACC to Egnyte. Originally, we were looking to building a Forge app for this.

But when we found out about ACC Connect, their integration with Workato, it was clearly the easier choice. Out of the box, Workato had both the connections and the actions we needed to support the integration. Also, Workato's low-code environment made it easy to quickly spin up a solution.

We've been running this integration for-- or recipe as-- recipe, as Workato would call it-- for about three years now. It works pretty much flawlessly. The image to the right shows the number of specific jobs run over the past week. This specific job is upload files to Egnyte. It is a instance of a file being uploaded to Egnyte. It has uploaded, for instance, in this week 14,000 files to Egnyte.

Even those errors, those failures, aren't technically an error with the integration, but are usually related to a corrupted model or something along those lines. So clearly, this has been very successful. Overall, we've been really happy with Egnyte and ACC. Both have solid APIs, which have met all of our needs and beyond.

AARON VORWERK: Now, a couple quick things-- one, I remember, Greg, that-- I think it was Todd Martin in an email thread said he was downplaying this, just saying, well, it just-- it works. We're at a 99.998% success rate over last couple of years. So that's a quote right there. That's really impressive, actually.

I think it was Todd. The other was-- you've got some Workato experience outside of this, right? That's a familiar platform.

GREGORY KLEIN: Yeah. So we have some other integrations set up. One of the notable ones is an auto-publish feature. So sometimes, users forget to publish within the-- within collaboration within the Revit model. And so at night, we'll just run through. We find any newly synced models that haven't been published and just automatically publish them. Stuff's really easy to set up. To be honest, Workato makes it very easy.

AARON VORWERK: It's good to have that reassurance. I'm also thinking that's a trust, but verify mentality with your users, right? They're normally going to take care of it. But just in case they didn't--

Well, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. We'll come back to you if you have thoughts when you see what Brad has to share about where you'd like to go next, perhaps. So I'm going to hold that in reserve. But now I want to hand it off to Brad to tell us a little bit about Charles Perry Partners and yourself.

BRAD BUCKLES: Thank you, Aaron. My name is Brad Buckles. I'm vice president of technology and innovation here at CPPI. CPPI is an institutional contractor based out of Gainesville, Florida. We have offices throughout Florida, Georgia, into South Carolina. We were founded in 1968. And our core focus is on hospitals, K-12, governments, such as local and state, colleges, universities. Those are our core customers. But we also span into commercial and other different market segments as well.

So back in 2022, I had the privilege of taking the stage at Autodesk University and share CPPI's experience of how we strived and accomplished touching data one time. And to make that vision a reality, we leveraged Autodesk Construction Cloud and Egnyte with ACC Connect to take files, such as contracts and change orders and pay applications, and bring those out of ACC Connect and store them within Egnyte so that our accounting department had access to them, so that our records and retention policy was satisfied, and keep things moving along that-- in that direction.

That near-real-time access to our data allowed our accounting department, whether-- regardless of where they were located, to be able to access those files and work with those project teams. And if they needed to upload something, instead of having to log in to ACC or into Cost Management and upload files, they would be able to just upload them into a folder in Egnyte. And then that-- ACC Connect would then push that to Autodesk Build.

And so that interoperability between the office and the project teams has been tremendous. We also use it in pre-construction. Our marketing department has access to those folders. And so it's good for everybody.

The amount of work that project managers have to do to shuffle papers around is unbelievable. So we wanted to set our mission out to where they just do it once and move on. And we've been able to accomplish that.

AARON VORWERK: I'm curious, Brad, have you placed-- have you put in place automated retention policies and so on with Egnyte?

BRAD BUCKLES: So the way we have our structured data folders, we don't really utilize that portion of Egnyte for the sheer purposes that we wanted to work around some various different types of workflows, depending on the types of contracts and things like that. So we haven't specifically used that, Aaron, something that we probably should be revisiting because I know that Egnyte has certainly matured along the areas of records and retention policies. But as of today, no, we're not utilizing that.

AARON VORWERK: That's all right. I hear this a lot when I ask about some of these-- it's-- so you've done all of this work that automates getting stuff to the right place to conform with policy and to save accounting all this time. It's still hard to really let go and let the AI do some things on the backend, I think.

BRAD BUCKLES: Well, it really is. It's changing the mindset, too. Right, Aaron? An accounting department gets used to how they handle their own documents. And they feel like they want to maintain that control. But sometimes, automating some of these things, it's not like they're really losing any kind of control there. It's just letting the system do the things that they're already doing manually.

AARON VORWERK: Well, I appreciate you sharing this use case because it's so different than what Greg shared a minute ago. And I think Greg's use case is-- I feel like that's the no-brainer. That's a really solid option. So this is something different. But I know that you have some asks. You'd like to see some other things become available. So maybe I'll cue that up for you.

BRAD BUCKLES: Thank you very much. So as Greg had mentioned and Aaron mentioned, ACC Connect is not difficult. It's not something that you have to go in and code yourselves. It has a lot of plug-and-play features in there.

But what we're looking for-- and by the way, I haven't seen this-- any kind of new integration coming out from Egnyte, personally. But what I'd love to see is the ability for, perhaps, end users to be able to create synchronizations and their own what Workato would call recipes to be able to create automations within their own particular workflows.

What we'd also love to see is the ability to be able to sync metadata specifically with things like photo tags and geotagging, things such as that. We'd like to pull that out of Autodesk, bring that into Egnyte, and-- but be able to also continue to capture that geotagging and any custom tags or AI tags that were applied to those photos, have them populate Egnyte's metadata capabilities.

And then, of course, right now, we lack the visibility into Autodesk from a governance standpoint. So we love the features that Egnyte has for their protect module. Aaron, I'm not sure exactly what the name of it is. But the-- help me out here.

AARON VORWERK: Secure & Govern?

BRAD BUCKLES: Yeah, Secure & Govern. We love that capability. And we'd like to extend that capability out into Autodesk Build as well. And so we're looking for some more flexibility. We're looking for more visibility and, certainly, more automation. We can't get enough automation, it seems, these days. So any ways we can make things easier, that's what we're always looking to do.

AARON VORWERK: Well, thanks for that, Brad. I'm going to come back to-- I'll keep coming back to metadata. But now that you've teed up a couple of ideas, I want to turn the floor over to Kevin to talk about what we're working on right now and perhaps talking about, when you see this video after Autodesk University live has happened, perhaps these things will be real. So with that in mind, Kevin Leatham talking about, perhaps, some new capabilities on their way--

KEVIN LEATHAM: Thanks for having me, Aaron. And the good news is these items are actually already real. We're just getting very close to rolling them out. So my name is Kevin Leatham. I'm a senior product manager at Egnyte. My focus is primarily on our AEC line of business. And I'm very excited to announce two separate product enhancements for you today.

You just heard from some mutual Egnyte and Autodesk customers on how well these two platforms work together. But as Brad just alluded to, there's always more that can be done, always room for improvement. So I'm excited to announce two things today, data governance on Autodesk Construction Cloud and a native Egnyte-to-ACC connector.

I'm going to go ahead and start with data governance. Egnyte has always offered data governance across a multitude of platforms, from Microsoft content sources, like MS Exchange or MS 365, to Google sources, like Google Drive and GCS, and some other cloud storage platforms, like Amazon S3, Box, Dropbox, and so on. But now we are going to support governance across your file stored on Autodesk's Construction Cloud as well.

So this should put IT admins and security professionals at ease. Let's take a look at some of the benefits you'll get. I'm going to start by introducing Eric. Eric is an IT admin. He works for a mid-sized GC. And they perform some work on high-profile, sensitive jobs.

Eric ultimately wants a better understanding as to what data is stored on Egnyte versus ACC and where exactly that data lives. Fortunately for Eric, he will now see Autodesk as a supported content source from Egnyte's Secure & Govern platform. Immediately after connecting ACC as a content source from Egnyte, he'll get an overview of his data. He can quickly find critical information, such as how much data he has, how old the data is, and in which folders all of this data is stored. All of this information is going to be available to him in an easy-to-consume dashboard.

But Eric's company was just awarded a federal job. And now he has to oversee the security of CUI, or controlled unclassified information. Eric wants to protect and limit the distribution of this data so it can be handled in an appropriate manner and, ultimately, safeguarded.

Fortunately for Eric, Egnyte can scan his ACC repository for sensitive content based on policies that he or another IT admin have enabled. From Egnyte, Eric is going to be able to see his folder hierarchy in ACC and select files that have been identified by Egnyte as matching his policies.

Once he finds these files, he can dig in deeper to see which policies exactly have identified this data. Egnyte will give you a risk score and even allow you to see the content within the file itself that has been flagged. Egnyte automatically identifying this content and alerting him to where his CUI data is stored allows him to securely handle his CUI and other sensitive data without issue.

Another benefit of Eric governing his data on ACC is better visibility into permissions within ACC. With this overview, Eric can reduce or even completely eliminate risk, such as wrongful access to files. From Egnyte, he will have a view of all of his linked content sources, now including Autodesk.

After selecting a folder from his Autodesk source, he immediately has visibility into which users can view that respective folder on ACC and their corresponding permission level. He'll be able to toggle this view between viewing by folder and the respective permissions that are allotted on that folder or by users and groups so that he can easily see all folders that that respective user or group has access to view.

I know many of our Egnyte customers use templates or have processes in place to ensure permissions are set properly on their data. But it goes without saying that mistakes are made. And now you'll be able to audit your ACC permissions via this overview directly in Egnyte.

These are just a couple of the highlights. But Egnyte will also support subject access requests and can automatically create issues to alert you to vulnerabilities that need to be remediated.

AARON VORWERK: Before you go on, Kevin, I just want to emphasize this is this complementary idea. This is a real strength of Egnyte in general applied to a part of ACC that doesn't exist. This kind of functionality-- it's not competing at all, but rather just enhancing the value of what's in Autodesk Construction Cloud. So it's just a natural fit for anyone that understands both sides.

KEVIN LEATHAM: Thank you for that, Aaron. Now I'm going to transition to our other product announcement, a native Egnyte and ACC connector. So this connector will provide a one-way sync between a folder in Egnyte and the Files module within ACC. Egnyte built this integration because we felt it was important to give you a bit more control and flexibility over where your data resides, which data you want to sync, and ultimately how frequently you would like that data to sync.

So let's take the example of Mark in this instance. Mark is a designer for an ENR 400 design firm. And he wants to set up a sync between Egnyte and ACC because his project team likes to access their project files in Autodesk Construction Cloud, but his legal and marketing teams like to access their data in Egnyte.

So directly from this folder in Egnyte, Mark will now be able to configure a new sync with Autodesk Construction Cloud. By simply selecting Autodesk Project Sync and then the Create New option from Egnyte, he'll get this easy-to-use modal. After providing a connection name, selecting his ACC account and project, and then the folders that he would like to sync between the two platforms, he immediately starts to see data synchronizing. So how easy is that? Anybody can do it. And it eliminates the need for IT or other services to get involved If you want an end user, like Mark, to be able to configure the sync.

Marks drafting team also prefers to manage their BIM workflow in BIM Collaborate Pro. But they're required to save their published versions back to Egnyte so they can have a complete copy of all project documents in one location. Via this new integration, Mark can fully automate this process and access their modeling files in their preferred platform of choice. Go ahead and take a look here. You can see the contents of the Egnyte and ACC folder on ACC are mirrored in Egnyte after configuring the sync.

If you'd like to learn more about data governance on ACC or Egnyte's new native integration in Autodesk Construction Cloud, please reach out to an Egnyte representative. Back to you, Aaron.

AARON VORWERK: Thanks, Kevin. Before I add more comments, I wonder if either Greg or Brad-- if you have comments, reactions, because I know that neither of you, I believe, have seen this up till now.

GREGORY KLEIN: This is the first time I've seen it. And I'll tell you guys-- have really exceeded expectations, specifically like the ability for the end user to be able to select the folders that they want to be able to sync down to Egnyte. I would also like to see that there's an administrative capability, as well, that can not be overridden to make sure that we set these folders that we want to sync to Egnyte from a corporate standard operating procedures level and then just make sure that those settings stay intact and not get changed.

But I'll tell you, this is great. I really like the ability to be able to see the permissions. I did have one question for you. And that is, if you edit a permission in Egnyte, does that permission get synced, as well, over to Build?

KEVIN LEATHAM: So the first implementation we're talking about today, Brad, is strictly visibility into your permissions in ACC. So if you have the need to modify a permission, you would need to go to ACC to do so. This is strictly bringing awareness to where you may have anomalies or permissions that need to be remediated for any reason.

BRAD BUCKLES: Gotcha. That's great. And I'll tell you, to Aaron's point, it's much, much needed as well. It enhances the permissions set within ACC and bringing that into a more visible way. So great job. I love it. I can't wait for it.

AARON VORWERK: Greg, I know when we talked, you were-- previously, you were talking about, well, we just-- this works. I'm not sure if any of this other stuff would really be needed because we're happy with what we have, or at least that's the-- my elementary takeaway from it. But I wonder if seeing the data governance, like the compliance policies, the ability to just enforce things in ACC in a way that maybe you haven't really even considered before-- I wonder if you see that as potentially being something now to consider that you hadn't considered before.

GREGORY KLEIN: Well, potentially, it could replace the integration that we already have that backs it up. On top of that, we're moving to ACC a lot of our documents. So that includes construction documents, like PDFs. And one of the integrations that we have with our current construction document system that we use is that we bring those files down onto Egnyte for easy access because we like to use other tools to review those PDFs on desktop. So this type of integration, I believe, should allow us to do stuff like that as well.

AARON VORWERK: Thanks for your reactions to that. I'll move us to the conclusion here. This is not something that's-- that Kevin showed us today. But it begins to open the door, this idea of a direct integration, a direct connection, between the platforms to where, as was expressed earlier by Brad, and maybe even I keep harping on earlier-- is this idea of metadata and understanding the data, regardless of where it sits.

What if we didn't really care where the data was, but we could understand its value at any given point in time and use the information, or append the information even, accordingly? So what if, for example, without having to take a file out of Autodesk Construction Cloud, I would be able to assess it, as we're talking about through our governance, but maybe even add more information to it that is understandable by Autodesk Construction Cloud, and so on? We could have a feedback loop between these applications that is smarter than just, is this the same copy over here that we have over here?

And so I see a potential for us to go much further with this just by opening this door. And so I'm excited about what the Egnyte product team has been doing. It's-- seems like it's a step in the right direction to have best-in-class integration.

So I want to just say thanks again. It's not always easy to find customers who are interested in talking about-- whether it's just our software or other softwares working together. But Greg, Brad, I really appreciate that you were willing to step up and talk about your use cases as they sit today and maybe what you'd like to see in the future. And then thanks, Kevin, for introducing us to what's next as we go into Autodesk University.

BRAD BUCKLES: Thank you, Aaron.

AARON VORWERK: With that, I think we'll conclude today's session. Thanks, everyone, for joining.