Today, April 15, 2021, Autodesk announced their intent to acquire cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) and product data management (PDM) solution provider, Upchain. The acquisition provides Autodesk an established data collaboration platform upon which to support a decentralized product value chain. Upchain delivers a multi-tenant, cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture with rapid-deploy capability. CIMdata welcomes the acquisition and believes it will provide Autodesk customers improved capabilities to manage complex product systems across distributed teams of stakeholders.
Autodesk has indicated they will maintain Upchain’s open approach to data, supporting integration not only with Autodesk solutions Inventor, AutoCAD, and Fusion 360, but also with other CAD systems used in the product manufacturing industry. Autodesk indicated that one of their first actions will be to integrate Upchain with Forge, Autodesk’s cloud-based developer platform.
Mr. Andrew Anagnost, President and CEO of Autodesk stated, “The convergence of data and processes is transforming the industry. By integrating Upchain with our existing offerings, Autodesk customers will be able to easily move data without barriers and will be empowered to unlock and harness valuable insights that can translate to fresh ideas and business success.”
“Comments by Autodesk on their analyst call announcing the acquisition suggest that customer demands for cloud-native PDM were increasing and acquiring Upchain was a great way to meet that demand,” says Stan Przybylinski, CIMdata’s Vice President. “It also clarifies Autodesk’s digital thread support, focusing more on the engineering work in process than perhaps they were doing with Forge, their platform initiative.”
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during Autodesk's second quarter of fiscal year 2022, ending July 31, 2021.