Autodesk: Billy Hinners, CIO

Billy Hinners, CIO of Autodesk speaks to ZDNet Editor-in-chief Dan Farber about creating design software for its eight million customers in the construction, media and manufacturing industries. He also talks about the company's green strategy, his 20 years in product development and transitioning to his new role as CIO.

Autodesk is a large company, $1.5 billion in revenue last year, and certainly well known for its engineering and architectural software, but you're also into entertainment, so, what do you think is the core focus of the company.

Billy Hinners: Well, I like the way Carol [Carol Bartz, the chairman of the company and former CEO] used to put it. She used to say that if God didn't make it, one of our customers probably did.

I liked the idea that we're about helping the people who are building pretty much everything we work with today, whether it's the buildings we work in or the devices that we interact with. Those are typically designed by our customers [who are] frequently using our products.

Autodesk has eight million customers. Who are they and what do they use your products for?

Billy Hinners: Our customers are in the building industry so they're architects and construction engineers who are designing and building the buildings that we live and work in. That's one big market for us.

Then the manufacturing industry, they're the people who are designing the devices that you see around you every day, the telephones, the automobiles, the televisions, the rollable tables. They're all using our products to design those devices and manufacture them.

Then the next big area for us is infrastructure services. So, we look at things like mapping GIS and civil, so when you build a big development, how does the ground get laid out and how are we moving that earth around? They use our products.

And then the finally one is media and entertainment, where people are shooting things digitally. They're under a big transformation as well in that a lot of the medium entertainment is going into digital these days. They're using a lot more software tools to do all the editing and postproduction and effects. They use a lot of our products for that kind of thing.

As I understand it, you came out of product development, 20 years of developing products for Autodesk and now you're the CIO. I was curious as to how you are taking the style that you had in product development, which is very much teamwork and collaboration, and taking that up to the level of a CIO and how you are instantiating things on a broad level for the company.

Billy Hinners: Well, one of the big challenges in making the transition from product development to IT, was in product development I worked on the AutoCAD product line for a long time and we already by the time I started working on it, we had a pretty large code base, and the challenges were around taking these millions of lines of code and adding enough new features to it to make a compelling new offering for the customers without breaking anything that was in the millions of lines that were already there.

And, one of the big achievements that we had, that I was pretty proud of, was that we got the cycle time for doing that down from 24 months in the worst case and 18 months probably in the best case, down to about a year now.

We can add compelling value without breaking anything in a yearly cycle.

Coming to IT, it's kind of a whole different ball game, because we find ourselves working on 30 different projects at one time, which are either not related at all or may be related in subtle and non obvious ways with one another. And they have timelines that range anywhere from three months to maybe about a year, which is a long project for IT.

And so, there is a lot more churn, a lot more things happening, and no down time. You go from one project to the next and there are a lot of transition efforts.

How do you decide which projects get a green light? And especially given you have 30 projects, how do you manage all of that complexity?

Billy Hinners: Well, one of the things we have been doing a lot better lately than we did when we were a younger company is we've got some corporate governance in place to manage the project portfolio and the priorities.

So each of the business divisions comes once a year with most of their priorities, and the governance board helps prioritise those and decides which ones we should take on first.

And we create a pretty detailed one year road map and a less detailed projection out three years.

And so we try to get the business to think about the fact that if their project doesn't come in the first year or the first phase, it's like the BART system, the bus is continually coming and you can catch the next one if you don't catch the first one.

That's also been a challenge because there is a huge appetite for change, for improving the business process at Autodesk.

Now, we were talking earlier about how you came from product development and how that's a very collaborative process. What are some of the tools and technologies that you're using to foster an innovative workspace, as well as to speed up product delivery?

Billy Hinners: I think one of the big challenges is we have, like I said, this big globalisation and how we're working with an increasingly distributed workforce. So that brings a lot of complications in terms of the need to coordinate, the need to communicate and that's a big challenge that we face all the time.

So, we're looking at a lot of different solutions for that. You know for our customers, we have Buzzsaw. That was an innovation the company drove a few years ago to help that kind of collaboration between...

People people working simultaneously on a...

Billy Hinners: That's right.

Drawing or a drafting...

Billy Hinners: That's right.

Or architectural drawing.

Billy Hinners: That's right. So we're looking at similar technologies we can use internally to get people to work better.

I mean, are you mostly an e-mail culture or are you using wikis or blogs or any of these other Web 2.0 style technologies?

Billy Hinners: We're heavily an e-mail culture still. I see that gradually changing. Certainly in IT, we use wikis a lot. We use them for understanding how we're doing on GoLives and things like that. Communicating across again we have people globally involved in our GoLive, Project GoLives. That's how they update everybody else on the team as to what the status is of their portion of the GoLive. So, I see then engineering teams rolling these out too.

Blogs, we mostly use blogs to communicate with our customers about what's happening internally.

Let me ask you something about what your CEO Carl Bass said. He said, "Customers experience things they build before they are built using Autodesk software." Can you apply that notion to IT? That you can, not just virtualise your datacenter, but virtualise the whole process of creating a business process.

Billy Hinners: Well, I'm not sure if we can, but we definitely need to. Today one of the big problems we have with our IT projects is sometimes our internal users don't really know exactly what it is that they want or they can't specify it in enough detail to have us build it accurately.

So that's that disconnect between IT and the business users...

Billy Hinners: That's right.

Trying to come up with a common language to say, "This is what we want."

Billy Hinners: And it can generate if you don't have good specifications up front, it generates a lot of change late. Then you don't have reliable dates or you have to cut back on scope. That can generate a lot of frustration. So we really need to get into a more iterative cycle in the early stages where we can help the business envision what it is they're going to get by doing prototypes or another technology that, we're just starting to experiment with, is from a startup called iRise. They have some solutions for simulating your IT systems and especially how the users are going to interact with those systems. So we're hoping that technologies like that and changing our methodology to be with a little more iterative can help our business users visualise what they're going to get.

Let's talk a little bit about your core platforms. Your datacenters, are you focused more on scaling out or scaling up?

Billy Hinners: Well, we're in the middle of actually trying to rethink out datacenter strategy. The reason for that is that one of the big trends facing the industry today I think is what I would call computing in the cloud. And it's being driven by the number of cores being added to a single CPU and the increased number of CPU's being put in a single server and then the increased number of servers being put in a datacenter.

So this leads to a huge amount of computing power at your fingertips and in the datacenter. That makes us internally at Autodesk think about software as a service, increasingly becoming an attractive solution to deliver that power in the datacenter to our customers.

So, from an IT perspective, we have to think about how we're going to provide the platform for the software as a service solution. So, we have a couple of things that we're thinking about there. One is we're also interested in Amazon Web Services. They've got some pretty interesting innovations there.

The Elastic Compute Cloud.

Billy Hinners: Exactly, the Elastic Compute Cloud and the Simple Storage Service solution. Those things look pretty interesting to us. We're just in the very beginning stages of some experiments there to see what that means and what we can build with some pools like that.

And for your own datacenters, what are you doing to I see many companies are focused right now on consolidation, virtualisation, and all those technologies to reduce the cost and also to make their datacenters more green.

Billy Hinners: Well that's another trend I see facing the industry today; this acknowledgement that energy costs are just climbing very high.

And one way of addressing that is definitely virtualisation. We're big on that. So, where you have two servers utilised 50 percent or less, you can use virtualisation technology to combine that into a single server that behaves as if it were two and yet uses the full power of that single server. And you eliminate one altogether.

So that's a great technology.

Well, finally let me ask you about what trends you're watching. What do you think down the road is really going to have some significant impact on your IT?

Billy Hinners: I touched on the fact that I think energy conservation is another big global trend that's affecting us today. That also ties in with the analysis piece because our customers want to analyse their buildings or their devices to see what the energy consumption is going to look like before they build them.

But internally it affects us as well. So, we're certainly thinking about how we choose vendors. We like to choose vendors who have the same sort of social responsibility that we do and that are doing things in a green way. It affects things like how we manage our datacenters.

One idea that has been occurring to me lately is the idea that we need as an industry hot computing. I think computers today have been designed for operating in an environment the same environment that the human operators operate in.

But the reality is that that's not what they need to be designed for. They need to be designed for the worst case scenario in the datacenter because that's increasingly where the computers are going, the heavy DB ones anyway. You've got to worry about what's happening to that server that's in the top shelf of the cabinet in the datacenter after you've had a power outage and before the generators have had time to spin up. That computer can get up to 15 to 20 degrees higher than ambient temperature during that outage time.

So that's what the computer needs to be designed for is that temperature, that 20 degrees higher than ambient temperature. And if we can increase that level then we can run our datacenters all hotter and dramatically reduce the energy consumption because cooling the datacenter is actually I think the last statistic I heard might've been 60 percent of the power cost of running the datacenter.