When Jonah was swallowed by the whale, what happened to his customers? And what about his competitors? The whale’s competitors? What about all that stuff they both made?
With Autodesk’s October 4 announcement of a “definitive agreement” to acquire Alias for $182 million in cash, the industry is already gazing into the eye of a 3D leviathan, trying to figure out its intentions.
Autodesk, the world’s leading design and collaboration software company, with reported revenue of over 1.2 billion last year, now adds Alias’ Maya, MotionBuilder and FBX software to its current 3D authoring toolset, which includes Autodesk VIZ and 3ds Max. While Softimage, its prime remaining competitor, has declined to comment at this time, one can guess the Avid division is in a bit of a spin.
Most customers, however, seem warily optimistic about what the merger will mean. According to Alex Lindsay, chief architect and founder of Pixel Corps (and Studio/monthly “How” contributor), the applications “are due for an overhaul.” “The most likely outcome,” he says, “is to just improve integration in the short term and put money into a new application that has the interactivity of MotionBuilder, the extensibility of Maya and game tools from Max.”
Likewise, Torsten Reil, CEO and co-founder of NaturalMotion, sees both parties’ product lines, specifically Maya and Max, continuing into the foreseeable future, and hopes to also see a boost for FBX as an industry standard. “Autodesk and Alias have the opportunity to pool their R&D resources (financial and talent) and take their time to create a successor to Max and Maya,” says Reil. “Ironically, the lack of competition between them might result in more innovation in the long term.”
Brad Peebler, president and co-founder of Luxology (and former NewTek LightWave executive), says “this deal is not about Max/Maya but rather CAD (Autocad/Studio). Autodesk has a lot more to gain by leveraging Alias Studio tools into the CAD market than they do in the entertainment space,” he says. “If Autodesk treats Maya as they have Max, this would be incredibly negative for the Maya product… . However, if Autodesk plays this right and leverages the work Alias has done secretly over the past few years to connect the CAD pipeline to Maya, this convergence could be a huge win for the market in general.”