Autodesk 2014 Annual Report Download - page 108

2013 Annual Report
2014 Form 10-K 34
our customers, including flexible license and service offerings, product suites and cloud and social-based services, to
better match the business needs of our customers. We will continue to emphasize developing relationships with large,
global customers and pursuing opportunities 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 redesigning our applications to leverage
the cloud. We are also developing new capabilities that are enabled by the cloud such as collaborative Product
Lifecycle Management (“PLM”), Building Information Modeling (“BIM”) and online simulation. Our goal is to lead
our industry in transitioning to the cloud, and use cloud services to provide more value to new and existing
subscriptions.
 Expand. We believe that the combination of cloud, social and mobile computing affords us the opportunity to expand
our business into new markets and extend the value of our customers' digital design information into visualization,
analysis and simulation. We have added new customers through our products and services that are delivered and
experienced through the web, cloud and mobile devices providing our advanced visualization technologies to
consumers - a whole new category of Autodesk customer. We intend to continue to develop our business to both add
new customers and find new capabilities to incorporate in our core business.
We believe suites present 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 2014, revenue from suites increased 15%, as compared to the prior fiscal year. As a
percentage of revenue, suites increased to 34% in fiscal 2014 as compared to 29% in fiscal 2013.
Expanding our geographic coverage is another key element of our growth strategy. 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, including infrastructure build-out and innovative design and manufacturing.
Although revenue from emerging countries remained flat during fiscal 2014 as compared to fiscal 2013, we believe that
emerging economies continue to present long-term growth opportunities for us. Revenue from emerging countries represented
15% and 14% of fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2013 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, software piracy and different purchase patterns as compared to the developed world.
Today, complex challenges such as globalization, urbanization, and sustainable design are driving our customers to new
levels of performance and competitiveness, and we are committed to helping them address those challenges and take advantage
of new opportunities. To achieve these goals, we are capitalizing on two of our strongest competitive advantages: our ability to
bring advanced technology to mainstream markets, and the breadth and depth of our product portfolio.
By innovating within existing technology categories, we bring powerful new design capabilities to volume markets. Our
products are designed to be easy-to-learn and use, and to provide customers with a low cost of deployment, a low total cost of
access to our software offerings, and a rapid return on investment. In addition, our software architecture allows for extensibility
and integration with other products. The breadth of our technology and product line gives us a unique competitive advantage,
because it allows our customers to address a wide variety of problems in ways that transcend industry and disciplinary
boundaries. This is particularly important in helping our customers address the complex challenges mentioned above. We also
believe that our technological leadership and global brand recognition have positioned us well for long-term growth and
industry leadership.
In addition to the competitive advantages afforded by our technology, our large global network of distributors, resellers,
third-party developers, customers, educational institutions, faculty and students is a key competitive advantage. This network of
relationships provides us with a broad and deep reach into volume markets around the world. Our distributor and reseller
network is extensive and provides our customers with the resources to purchase, deploy, learn, and support our products quickly
and easily. We have a significant number of registered third-party developers who create products that work well with our
products and extend them for a variety of specialized applications.
We are committed to helping fuel a lifelong passion for design in students of all ages, and inspiring and supporting
educators. As such, we offer extensive educational programs supporting our software and services including a new program,
initiated in fiscal 2014, under which we grant software licenses to educational institutions in select regions and to key partners
for little or no fees. Through these programs we intend to further Science, Technology, Engineering, Digital Arts, and Math