The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas overflowed with 10,000 CIOs, designers and professors rushing past robotic displays and hired-hand stormtroopers to get to one or another of 700 classes and presentations at Autodesk University 2015, Dec. 1-3. The software company announced an investment in Skycatch—a drone startup—and the release of an open-source, cloud-based application protocol interface (API) called Forge, with its own $100-million fund to support developers.
“I love the Forge announcement and where Autodesk is going with the platform,” says John Jacobs, CIO at JE Dunn Construction Group Inc., Kansas City, Mo. He says his team plans to take advantage of the cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service from Autodesk Inc. San Rafael, Calif. The PaaS has an open API and developer kits to allow software developers or large general builders to build cloud-based apps that integrate with Autodesk offerings.