Las Vegas Blues

So I just got back from a brief three days in Las Vegas. I'm finally figuring out how to enjoy that town - for the first time I was considering rescheduling my flight to stay longer. Usually at the end of a Vegas conference I'm worn out and more than ready to leave. Not so this time.  This time I'm a bit sad that it is all over. I was staying at THEhotel, which had a cafe called THEcafe and a lounge called THElounge. And stickers on the toilet paper rolls in the room that said THE TP. THEVegas is an odd town.

The OTC conference was great - people were there from all over - I'm a bit of an outsider for this event as it is geared to the business development and sales side of Autodesk's business. (I was there to give some technical training.) Sales is just a different world than what I see most days working inside the Autodesk tower walls. I know I'm repeating myself from previous posts, but I find it very interesting to get the perspective from the field. 

The conference started with an opening session where Carl Bass talked about Autodesk as a company.  (Actually it started with a mini-performance from the Blue Man Group. Once the crowd was hyped up, then Carl took the stage.) Carl discussed world trends such as globalization, worldwide development of new infrastructure, increasing sensitivity to environmental impact, and the increasing ubiquity of digital data. These trends impact what & how our customers design, sparking more and more interest in digital prototyping tools. (Yes I took notes.)  Obviously the increasing demands for infrastructure leads to significant opportunity in for those of us in Plant. Carl also pointed out some cool work being done by Autodesk clients - work like as creating iconic Olympic structures in Beijing or supporting the Easter island mapping project.

 

Our Plant industry sessions included interesting things such as integrating external databases with P&ID, preview of our 3D Piping application, and using Navisworks to walk through a Plant model. Navisworks - what a cool acquisition; I look forward to taking advantage of it in the future. And then the training session was lively and well received.

That's it for now.  Oh, and happy Pi day 2008.