Rand Worldwide boasts new partnerships and web portal

Sanjay Gangal interviewed Marc Dulude, CEO of Rand Worldwide at Autodesk University 2011 in Las Vegas.

Sanjay: What are you showing today at your booth?

Marc: We have an iPad station with a whole series of iPads for people to interact with our new portal. We are also showing technologies from our partners, VSpace, Leica as well as Rand Secure Archive, our facilities management solution.

Sanjay: What is special is about these partnerships?

Marc: Leica scanners are used to do 3D scans of buildings or anything else. Our Scan-to-BIM product which we updated in 2011, now uses the Revit database itself. Those who are using Scan-to-BIM alongside Revit can interact with the scanned materials they got from Leica. This is a significant step. VSpace is a 3D holographic view of users’ displays. They are doing a launch here and have been working with us for some time. In the background we’ve been helping with customers’ needs and likely will incorporating some VSpace hardware into our training centers as well. Another great partnership is with HP – we decided to standardize on HP workstations for internal needs as well as training facilities, over a 3-year period, so we are expecting to buy close to 1,000 HP machines. We’re already up to about ¼ of that total.

Sanjay: Tell us about the relationship between Rand and IMAGINiT.

Marc: Rand Worldwide is the parent company. IMAGINiT is the division within that’s focused on Autodesk. Last year IMAGINiT combined with Avatech, by far the largest reseller of Autodesk products in North America as well as Canada, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. We have another division called Enterprise Applications, where we bring in facilities management applications, and for those we have a partnership with Archibus. We have considerable FM services and our Rand Secure Archive is a key component in that Enterprise Application group. Rand Secure Archive technology was developed in partnership with Autonomy based on their IDOL technology. We’re offering a cloud based as well as an on-premise implementation of archiving and retrieval for the small and medium businesses. This is extremely popular and we continue to expand in this area.

The Ascent Center for Technical Knowledge is also part of Rand Worldwide, and they produce the coursework and curricula for the Autodesk Official training guides. Through Ascent we offer book titles, electronically or in book form in 47 countries around the world.

Sanjay: What was your new announcement?

Marc: We launched a new web portal called the ProductivityNOW Portal. One of the great things that came from Avatech and Rand Worldwide with the IMAGINiT merger, is both companies had taken different perspectives on what they wanted to offer customers through their web interfaces, and so we took advantage of the opportunity to bring together all that material and expand it with our Ascent materials. We have 85 application engineers that work full time just on solving customer problems, so we bring all this expertise into one place and offer various levels of access. People can get access even if they’re not a customer of IMAGINiT. If you’re a customer you can get more information, your own support information, and dedicated support team. They have access to all that information additionally with ProductivityNOW portal. They can look at subscription status, what are the licenses they have with which products, when they end, and the interface they set up for that. This is better than access they get from OEMs or partners. It’s extremely popular right now.

For more information, see www.rand.com or imaginit.com

Tags: Autodesk, Autodesk University 2011, IMAGINiT, Leica, Rand Worldwide, VSpace

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