Description
This week, Autodesk has announced a new $100 million project, which they are calling the Forge Initiative. At the center of the project is the new Forge Platform, a cloud-based platform that will encourage collaborative development to build what the company calls “a connected ecosystem for product development.”To facilitate the building of this ecosystem, Autodesk will be investing $100 million via the Forge Fund over the next several years in 3D developers and companies willing to build services and solutions on or connected to the Forge Platform. The company is particularly interested in startups, which they will offer technical and business support in addition to financial backing.The Forge Platform will offer open application programming interfaces (APIs) and and software development kits (SDKs) for developers to build cloud powered apps and services. Currently, Autodesk has 4,000 desktop developers, and they hope to draw many of them into the cloud in addition to attracting new ones.