Denodo Technologies > Case Studies > Autodesk Successfully Transforms its Revenue Model Using Denodo Data Virtualization

Autodesk Successfully Transforms its Revenue Model Using Denodo Data Virtualization

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Denodo Platform
AutoCAD
Autodesk Software

Tech Stack

Data Virtualization
ETL
Kafka

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements
Revenue Growth

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Data-as-a-Service
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Predictive Quality Analytics
Process Control & Optimization

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Autodesk is a leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software. Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop the broadest portfolio of 3D software for global markets. Customers across manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries, use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they are built or created. Considering the changing patterns in software consumption, the company decided to transform its revenue model from a conventional perpetual licensing to a more modern subscription-based licensing model to increase profits and propel growth.

The Challenge

Autodesk, a leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, decided to transform its revenue model from a conventional perpetual licensing to a more modern subscription-based licensing model to increase profits and propel growth. However, Autodesk's existing Business Intelligence (BI) system could not support this critical change to the revenue model. The transition impacted the finance department's ability to track subscriptions, renewals, and payments, and the BI system, which included an operational data warehouse, could not meet the demands of the business stakeholders, who increasingly required both high quality and timely data. Autodesk quickly decided that an evolution to an agile BI 2.0 architecture was necessary with a logical data warehouse at its core.

The Solution

Autodesk implemented a logical data warehouse using the Denodo Platform for data virtualization to address the change in their revenue model. At Autodesk, data originated from multiple and disparate data sources that included OLTP, flat files, geospatial data, streaming data from social media, and web logs. The traditional integration systems included ETL for batch processing of data from relational databases and Kafka (CSE) for integrating streaming data. Also, Autodesk had an enterprise data lake, which housed data from several big data sources such as Spark and Scala, while the OLTP and Geospatial data was ETL-d and stored in an operational data warehouse. The Denodo Platform for data virtualization was first introduced to Autodesk's Finance department, who used it to track subscriptions, renewals, and payments. Data virtualization helped to abstract the financial data from their business users without them having to touch or transform any of the physical data.

Operational Impact

Autodesk successfully transformed their revenue model using the Denodo Platform for data virtualization.
The Denodo solution provided the development team the flexibility to understand what they needed to build before they could actually build it.
The data virtualization solution also helped Autodesk’s business and development teams to become more collaborative.