Autodesk 2010 Annual Report Download - page 40

For fiscal 2010, the companies in our peer group are listed below. These companies all have headquarters
located in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the exception of BMC Software with headquarters in Houston,
Texas; CA, Inc. with headquarters in Islandia, New York and EMC Corporation with headquarters in Hopkinton,
Massachusetts.
Adobe Systems Incorporated Electronic Arts, Inc.
BMC Software, Inc. Intuit, Inc.
CA, Inc. McAfee, Inc.
Cadence Design Systems Inc. NetApp, Inc.
Citrix Systems, Inc. Symantec Corporation
eBay, Inc. VMware, Inc.
EMC Corporation Yahoo, Inc.
Our peer group is reviewed and updated, as necessary, each year to ensure that the comparisons are
meaningful. Several factors are considered in selecting our peer group, including industry, products and services
offered, revenue level, geographic location, and competitors for executive talent in our labor markets. Our peer
group was expanded between fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2010 to include five key competitors for executive talent—
CA, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc., EMC Corporation, McAfee, Inc., and VMware, Inc. In addition, two companies
were removed from the peer group list—BEA Systems, Inc. was removed due to its merger with Oracle, and
Synopsys, Inc. was removed due to its revenue level.
Elements of Executive Compensation Programs
Autodesk’s executive compensation program has three key components: (1) base salary, (2) short-term cash
incentives, and (3) long-term equity incentives. The Company also provides a comprehensive benefits program
and, under certain circumstances, severance. These programs are designed to attract, retain, and motivate highly
effective executive officers to achieve our business goals and improve stockholder value, by linking
compensation to our overall strategic and financial performance, while seeking to ensure that our executive
officers do not take unnecessary or excessive risks that could harm the Company and our stockholders. These
programs are also intended to mitigate potential conflicts between incentives that benefit any one executive to the
detriment of the Company and our stockholders. Although the amount and mix of each of these three key
components generally are determined by objective assessment, the Compensation Committee retains and
exercises judgment and subjective assessments in its ultimate compensation decisions.
Base Salary
Our base salary component provides fixed annual cash compensation set at a competitive level that
recognizes the scope, responsibility and skills required of the position. Each of our executive positions is
assigned to an executive salary grade level and associated pay range based on an internal assessment of each
position’s impact and scope of responsibility. The midpoints of the salary ranges are developed to reflect the
increasing scope of responsibility at progressively higher executive levels and to remain competitive within our
peer group. The midpoint of each range generally falls in the middle range of pay for similar jobs within our peer
group. In general, an executive officer who is new or less experienced in his or her role will be paid lower in the
range than an executive officer who has demonstrated proven performance in his or her role for many years, is
highly proficient in the skills required for his or her role and applies those skills to very high levels of
achievement.
We believe that generally targeting the overall range of salary compensation of our peer group keeps our
salary component competitive and balanced, and provides the Compensation Committee the flexibility to
increase compensation in its discretion. Base salary compensation is a reliable source of income for our executive
officers and an important part of retaining our executive officers, and is not subject to the variability of the short-
term cash incentive and long-term equity incentive components of our executive compensation programs.
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