- My name is Susan Clarke
and I'm an industry strategy manager at Autodesk
focused on our expansion into building operations.
I'm excited to be joined by Nick today from Eptura.
Please introduce yourself and your role at Eptura.
- Sure, name's Nick Stefanidakis,
and I head up our strategic alliances at Eptura.
And as Susan mentioned, I'm very excited
about the opportunity to work together
and to build this great technology
for managing buildings and space in the future.
(mellow music)
- Last year, Autodesk
and Eptura announced that we are going to formally
work together to create a next generation platform
that can manage building lifecycle data.
Nick, can you tell us more
about this alliance and what it means for customers?
- Yeah, I'm very excited about it because I have been
involved with this initiative to form this alliance
with Autodesk since the conversation started.
And to get from where we started
to where we are today has just been a great journey.
And I think from the beginning the vision was just
as you described, to connect the workflows
from design and construction into operations.
And that can mean maintenance and assets
but also what we were talking about workplace
and how people use the space
and are productive in the space.
And then even closing the loop on that,
and bringing the data that is collected
and measured and managed during operations
and feed that back into the next project,
the next planning and design, construction process.
So I think the value proposition that we can bring
to market together is really, really amazing.
You know, our great strength in operations
and facilities and workplace coupled with, you know,
Autodesk's position in the market, I think is amazing.
And we as a company are very excited about
not only the partnership but the technology and innovation
that we continue to work on together.
- At present, over 95% of data generated
during design and construction is lost or underutilized.
And actually that's a big miss for building owners
and operators because there's potentially
kind of really rich asset data that we're simply not using.
And there's lots of kind of wasted efforts
in trying to kind of replicate those asset databases.
So I think there is some good synergies
with the two companies working together
to try to bridge that data gap.
Why don't you tell us about the state of the market today?
What types of programs are your customers running?
- Today is new worlds from where we were
just 24, 30 months ago prior to the pandemic.
We were seeing a lot
of trends over the last number of years,
particularly around digital transformation,
hybrid work, hoteling,
these kinds of initiatives were really starting
to get momentum, and we were actually right
on the pulse of that transition with our products.
And overnight when the pandemic happened,
and everybody shut their offices and packed up
and went home, that really transitioned the whole industry
into the way people look at their buildings,
the way that they manage the space,
and how much space they need, the type of space they need,
and then the tools that they want to provide
to their employees.
So when they do come to the office, they can find somebody,
they can book a desk, they can get the services
that they need to be productive when they are in the office.
Very interesting time around the workplace side of things.
- One of the stats I've read and found very interesting
is that COVID has accelerated digitization
by three or four years.
So it's certainly been an interesting time.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Like I said, I think we were on the journey
but overnight it just, it's fully here.
Hybrid work is here and I don't think it's going away.
- I'd be interested to hear your perspective
of what the future of buildings and workplaces looks like.
- It's definitely going to continue to evolve,
the innovation around digital twins and what that means.
And of course that means different things
to different people.
But I think we're gonna see the systems, the software,
the solutions predict
and recommend based on real world conditions.
So whether it's managing occupancy or measuring occupancy
and having the building adjust
based on the the load, cleaning schedules,
all of the kind of autonomous things that we really
are seeing people wanting to get to,
that's not gonna happen overnight.
I think it's gonna follow a similar journey
to even BIM when it first came out as a new technology.
So it's gonna follow an innovation curve
or a maturity curve over the next many years.
But I think that's where things are gonna continue to go.
And areas that we're focusing on are things
like predictive maintenance, making recommendations,
automating a lot of the day-to-day tasks that people have
when they want to interact and work with their facilities.
- It's very interesting.
I mean, for me, the eventual future of buildings
will be autonomous buildings.
So they'll be self thinking, self optimizing,
bringing in real time data about the assets,
but also about people.
So they kind of create these great experiences.
But I think in the next three years there's still
a lot of innovation that we can look forward to.
I think we're going to see more data-driven buildings,
we're going to see the rise of demand-led services.
So everything is kind of starting to be based
on kind of more data inputs and more insights.
And clearly there's a role for lots
of different technologies there, including digital twins.
So we've spoken there about the market,
how it's changing and where it's going.
It'd be interesting now to talk
about our strategic alliance.
- We are very fortunate to, over the last several years,
bring together a lot of great technology
from a number of different companies
that we've merged over the last few years
that deliver solutions
for really the whole lifecycle management of a building.
Everything from where employees are gonna sit today,
managing occupancy, assets, maintenance, lease management.
So we're really excited
about all the technology that we've brought together,
and now we're on a great journey
along with Autodesk to take that technology,
build it into a platform that we can then
continue our integration with Autodesk
and deliver an integrated solution that covers
all of the needs for the full building lifecycle management.
What is interesting, and I think you touched upon it,
is there is a lot of other
handoffs that happen throughout the process
from planning to design, from design to engineering,
from engineering to construction and so on,
that there are lots of losses of information
at each one of those handoffs.
And I think what the work that Autodesk is doing
to connect that and smooth that through all
of the collaboration tools that you're bringing to market,
that the data at the end of the process
when people are starting to get into operations
is already so much more rich than it used to be
or could have been.
The systems are more interoperable,
and we're working together of course to make that transition
into the operations workflows and data management
that we do in our solutions, even, you know,
as easy as possible and as robust as possible
and providing tools to validate the deliverables
coming through that process.
- With the alliance,
Nick, I'd love to hear your perspective
on how customers will benefit from this.
- You know, obviously just benefit
from being more productive.
Whether it's like we were talking about around data loss
and transitioning to day one operations
ready for a new facility,
or just optimizing their existing facilities
with better data, better automation, better integration
and visualizations that our combined solutions can bring.
And really helping them through this transition
that the whole market's going through
from prior to the pandemic to now,
and what the facilities and their spaces and buildings mean
to their organizations and their employers.
As we know,
facilities are typically the second largest expense
in most organizations,
and they're looking at those hard now.
So if we can help with data and tools to optimize,
I think that would be really, really great.
What are you guys seeing around this in terms of how,
from your perspective, this is gonna benefit your customers?
- From our perspective, I think one
of the major factors is going to be enabling Autodesk
to have a full lifecycle proposition for buildings.
And this will bring two major benefits.
So firstly, it'll be an opportunity
for firms that have already invested in BIM or CAD
to get value from these investments for longer.
So they're no longer kind of tools
simply for kind of design and construction.
Actually something like BIM can now be the kind of backbone
for managing buildings throughout their life cycle.
And secondly, we work a lot
with building owners and we have done for many years.
But actually in terms of success,
I think part of it is delighting existing customers.
So we work a lot with building owners,
so imagine firms kind of owning
and operating airports, hotels, shopping malls, et cetera.
And we think by working with Eptura
we'll have a really strong lifecycle proposition.
And then actually if we look into the future,
I think it's really interesting
if Autodesk has a play in the space of operations
because we've spoken about closing the loop.
So I think in the future there's a potential
for us to kind of support the industry
with feeding back this operational data into new projects,
whether it's new buildings
or kind of renovations and retrofits.
At the same time, we know
that the built environment has been one
of the slowest asset classes to digitize.
So I'd be interested in your views
around what is holding the industry back.
- I think there's a lot of things that come into play around
I guess the slowness or resistance to change.
A lot of it's just legacy.
This is the way we've always done it.
I think our biggest competitor is to do nothing,
use Excel and other tools.
So that's number one.
Obviously there's cost and time as in the perception
that it is expensive and time consuming,
where it doesn't really need to be that way.
You know, there's a lot of value that can be derived
from a very simple implementation
to tackle a specific challenge
that the organization might have,
and then they can add to that over time.
You don't have to boil the ocean all at once.
You can do things little by little.
And I think so there's a education that needs to happen
to get people to understand that it's not all at once.
We can do it as a journey.
And the other thing I think is
that people are just not sure where to start.
So, you know, by breaking it down and making sure
that the owners can understand what they want to get
out of it, then we can work together to kind of
break it down into the pieces that they need,
and make sure that they're asking the right questions,
that their vendors are asking the right questions
and providing the right information.
But those are the things
that tend to kind of hold back, I think.
- Yeah, it's interesting.
And just some further things I have observed in my own work
is actually sometimes corporate real estate managers
can be quite risk averse.
They don't want to be the ones implementing
a kind of shiny new technology that ends up causing
new chaos to the workplace.
So I've seen a bit of that,
and I think that mindset of let's keep doing it
how it's always been done.
And actually sometimes the way that facility managers
access budgets can be quite challenging.
Sometimes the budgets across an organization
for facilities technology projects can be quite fragmented.
So you're trying to access kind of a very localized budget
rather than one that's kind of centrally managed,
which would typically fund
more IT transformational programs.
So yeah, there's lots of barriers there.
At the same time, I think the point we've been talking
about a lot recently is about going on a journey.
It's okay to start small
with the technology projects and build up from there.
- Have you found some industries versus other
are either more apt to go down the path or more resistant
to taking the plunge into this journey?
- Yeah, we have seen some quite different trends
by industry.
And actually another big variance in the market
is whether a building occupier owns the building
or leases a building.
So you'll often find healthcare, education,
because they're long-term building owners,
they're more incentivized to invest
in these technology projects that might pay off
across many years,
while someone leasing a building may be more reluctant
to make a transformational investment in their building.
But yeah, there's some really exciting
at the same time projects happening,
even in the workplace moment, hybrid working is kind of
forcing us to rethink how offices are designed,
how they're managed, to be experienced.
So that's one sector that I think that's really changed
in recent years
with new appetites for technology innovation.
- We've seen a little bit of a pivot recently
of keyword searches that people, you know,
we track that stuff, and what people are searching on.
It was a lot of around hybrid work, return to office,
those were kind of key terms that people were searching on.
And recently we've seen renovation move up the scale lately,
which we think is great because I think it means
that we're getting into the next phase
of this hybrid journey, post pandemic world.
And now people are, I think, gonna be creating new spaces,
new types of spaces, and you know,
technology enabling those spaces is gonna be, I think,
really key for both of us
to offer really great value to those customers.
- Thank you very much for joining us today.
Certainly the big takeaway for me is that we're looking
to be stronger together
and offer a full building lifecycle solution.
It'll be great to hear your kind of closing conclusion.
- I think we're really just at the beginning,
and really looking forward to where this is going to go
for both of our organizations, and the really great,
innovative things that I think we can do together.
And really enjoyed the conversation today.
Thank you for having me
and look forward to continuing to work together.