I think that in the geospatial industry, this last year was probably the most exciting in the last 20 years for a variety of reasons. This will be a lead to some of the things that Autodesk has been doing. One of the most important things is that people are now using the term geospatial a lot more than GIS. It is indicative of what is going on. It is important from the point of view of a company like Autodesk because people are now able to do what I would call geospatially enabled CAD rather than going out to buy a traditional GIS product to augment what they already have in CAD. What we have been calling geospatial enterprise—which means a single datastore where you can share information between multiple vendor applications and multiple applications—is now a reality. The other exciting thing that is going to happen in the next 12 months is that at least six satellites are going up, all claiming 1 to 3 m resolution. They are all earth observation satellites not just satellites. That means there is going to be an incredible amount of data available and it is going to get competitive and I would say, most mapping agencies around the world are already being backed up by the fact that so much data is available through Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or whatever. So this whole phenomenon of mass distribution of geospatial capabilities is changing things. One statistic I think that is phenomenal is that Google Earth had 100 million downloads in the first 12 months after its release. Before that there weren’t even a 100 million people who knew how to spell GIS or what it stood for. I call this a point of inflection. That should give you some context.

Autodesk background is CAD engineering. One of the interesting things is that most of the world’s geospatial vector data was captured using AutoCAD. I mean there are billions of BWG files out there and we are continuing to expand that base because we have vertical products that are focussed specifically on architecture, mechanical, engineering and so on. We are looking at the information flow downstream from that original CAD tool that created these things. One particular area I have been focussing on applies to telecom, municipal governments and utilities and anybody that has to manage network infrastructure. There are four islands of information in these large networks. There is the engineering group which typically uses CAD tool to design. The result of what they produce is construction drawing which is nothing but a piece of paper. There is a construction group, which actually builds that. Those guys take that piece of paper and build it and then, return that paper to what is typically called documentation or network documentation or network records. These guys have traditionally used GIS. They take the information that they get from the construction group. That becomes the permanent database of record for that organisation. If the Government of India or a state government or the regulator requires a record of the infrastructure, that is where it comes from.

Each of these groups uses its own technology. The flow of information between those groups is typically in the form of pieces of paper. This is true in the US, Canada, India or Malaysia or Indonesia or anywhere in the world. It is as if this came down from God many many years ago. This is how thou shalt do this kind of thing! So, wherever you go in the world, this is the process that is involved.