A major focus for me personally has been to push a wider delivery of services outside of the Autodesk realm. A large amount of work has been based on the initial selling of Discovery days, where we get the opportunity to build a business case in the form of a return brief to our clients. These have been successful, with 90% of these engagement resulting in more services, and product purchasing. Content management continues to be the most common challenge faced by our clients, hence the introduction of Content Studio to the A2K repertoire. I foresee this addition being important to the services that we currently provide.Recently, there has been an interest in A2K providing services around training landscape architects in Revit. This experience has been unique, as landscape architects work and solve problems in a particular way. As opposed to mainstream architects, where Revit is more suited for vertical spaces.This is due to the increased demand for BIM, where all disciplines are now expected to be able to demonstrate model collaboration, including landscape architects. Traditionally Landscape architects communicate design intent with rich and colourful 2 dimensional mediums. However, 2 of the largest landscape architecture firms are beginning to learn and understand the value of data, and the superior impact that this level of information conveys within the built environment. I wonder, with everything being about data, what do we do with software like AutoCAD in the near future?In addition to BIM, more and more architects, engineers and builders are looking to share data in a more intelligent manner. A2k will soon be offering Drofus as a service, with a focus on training, and implementation to tell. Drofus is a database from the Norwegian Company, which controls large amounts of data throughout the full lifecycle of a project. It is an excellent platform for each of the different disciplines to collaborate on building design, and this platform will serve us well we continue to provide BIM consulting to our customers.Shortly I’ll be starting to package all the necessary infrastructure for A2k staff internally. There is a need to improve our sharing mechanisms, as well as validating the data that we currently own. The benefits of trying to package this information will hopefully allow any of our technical resources to access clean, consistent information related to a specific niche or customer type. Therefore, increasing our point of sale and potential resourcing options due to the nature of our customers’ reactivity.I believe that Drofus will become one of our core services next year as we look to move away from the external perception that we are an Autodesk reseller, and ideally, become more perceived as highly solutions focused organisation to the outside world.
