Autodesk 2012 Annual Report Download - page 96

of training and providing fresh talent for our customers. Our global network of distributors, resellers, third party developers,
customers, educational institutions and students has been developed over our twenty-nine year history. We believe it is an
enduring competitive advantage that is difficult for others to replicate.
We continually strive to increase the business value of our design tools to our customers in a number of ways. First, we
seek to address an increasing portion of our customers' workflow with products that extend the value of our customers' digital
design information into visualization, analysis and simulation. Second, we seek to improve our product interoperability and
usability, thus improving our customers' productivity and effectiveness. Third, we continue to develop new ways to deliver
capability and value to our customers, such as product suites, cloud-based services, and delivery of our solutions on mobile
devices and new hardware platforms. Fourth, we extend our customers' workflow with products for adjacent users and for the
“customers of our customers,” thus increasing the value of the design information our customers produce. Finally, we continue
to develop new lines of consumer products and services that are delivered and experienced through the Web, tablets, and
mobile devices providing our advanced visualization technologies to consumers—a whole new category of Autodesk customer.
Autodesk was founded during the platform transition from mainframes and engineering workstations to personal
computers. We developed and sustained a compelling value proposition based upon desktop software for the personal
computer. Just as the transition from mainframes to personal computers transformed the industry thirty years ago, we believe
our industry is undergoing a similar transition from the personal computer to cloud, mobile and social computing. Our growth
strategy is predicated upon leading the transition in the industries we serve into the cloud in three ways:
• Grow. We believe sufficient opportunity remains in our PC-based software business and intend to continue to grow
this business. In particular we are offering product suites with improved interoperability and usability to enhance our
customers' productivity. We are continuing to drive maintenance and new licensing models to better match the
business needs of our customers. We will continue emphasis on developing direct relationships with large, global
customers and growing in emerging economies.
• Transform. At the same time we grow our desktop software business, we are migrating many of our products to the
cloud. This entails development of new cloud computing infrastructure and restructuring our applications to leverage
the cloud. We are also developing new capabilities that are enabled by the cloud such as collaborative PLM and on
line simulation. Our goal is to lead our industry in transitioning to the cloud.
• Expand. We believe that the combination of cloud, mobile, and social computing affords us the opportunity to expand
our business into new markets. Our consumer business is an example of this where we have added new customers. We
intend to continue to develop businesses such as this to both add new customers and find new capabilities to
incorporate in our core business.
We believe that expanding our customers' portfolios to include our suites presents a meaningful growth opportunity and is
an important part of our overall strategy. As our customers in all industries adopt our design suites, we believe they will
experience an increase in their productivity and the value of their design data. For fiscal 2012, revenue from Suites increased
31%, as compared to the prior fiscal year. As a percentage of revenue, suites increased to 27% in fiscal 2012 as compared to
23% in fiscal 2011.
Expanding our geographic coverage is another key element of our growth strategy. While emerging economies are
important for all global businesses, we believe they hold special opportunity for Autodesk. Much of the growth in the world’s
construction and manufacturing is happening in emerging economies. Further, emerging economies face many of the
challenges that our design technology can help address, for example infrastructure build-out. We believe that emerging
economies continue to present long-term growth opportunities for us and revenue from emerging countries increased 16%
during fiscal 2012 as compared to fiscal 2011. Revenue from emerging countries represented 16% and 15% of fiscal 2012 and
fiscal 2011 net revenue, respectively. While we believe there are long-term growth opportunities in emerging economies,
conducting business in these countries presents significant challenges, including economic volatility, geopolitical risk, local
competition, intellectual property protection, poorly developed business infrastructure, scarcity of talent and software piracy.
Our strategy includes improving our product functionality and expanding our product offerings through internal
development as well as through the acquisition of products, technology and businesses. Acquisitions often increase the speed at
which we can deliver product functionality to our customers; however, they entail cost and integration challenges and may, in
certain instances, negatively impact our operating margins. We continually review these trade-offs in making decisions
regarding acquisitions. We currently anticipate that we will acquire products, technology and businesses as compelling
opportunities become available. In fiscal 2012, we increased the number, pace and dollars spent on acquisitions in comparison
to fiscal 2011, but our decision to acquire businesses or technology is dependent on our business needs, the availability of
suitable sellers and technology, and our own financial condition.
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