Monday, June 24th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Autodesk passes up booth at Siggraph 2013


Autodesk’s Siggraph 2012 show reel. While the developer will be represented on the booths of five partner companies, this year is the first in most artists’ memory that it won’t have a booth of its own at Siggraph.

Autodesk won’t have a stand on the show floor at Siggraph this year, for the first time in well over a decade.

The company will still be holding its regular user event at the show, and will have a presence at the booths of a range of partner companies, including Intel, Wacom and Nvidia.

However, the Autodesk stand – and before that, the one for Discreet – has been a fixture of the Siggraph expo for years, and one of the show floor’s largest and most conspicuous exhibits.

Other usual suspects present and correct
Aside from Autodesk, the current Siggraph 2013 show floor plan looks largely as expected in recent years.

Other major CG software companies, including The Foundry, Pixologic, NewTek, Maxon and Side Effects are largely present and correct, as are Nvidia, AMD and Intel.

Autodesk isn’t the first major player in the CG industry not to take a booth at Siggraph: Adobe hasn’t exhibited at the show since the mid 2000s, for example, and e-on software hasn’t since 2010.

And in these days of video demos and online sales, it isn’t a suprise that trade shows figure less and less in companies’ marketing strategies.

But the news still prompted by far the most-read thread on CGTalk over the weekend: proof, if nothing else, that both Autodesk and Siggraph are still touchstones by which most people measure the state of the CG industry.

Updated 27 June: We asked Autodesk to comment on this story and its future involvement with Siggraph and other trade shows. Industry Manager Maurice Patel said:

“This year Autodesk revised its event strategy to better serve our customers. Our goal is to ensure that all customers, everywhere, can have accurate and timely access to new product information. As a result we have invested in virtual events such as the recent Unfold as they are more effective at reaching our customers worldwide.

“Also, our product roadmaps no longer align to events like SIGGRAPH and as a publicly-traded company we are limited as to what we can talk about outside of our fiscal quarters. Without product news, the effectiveness of exhibiting is limited. Going forward we will announce major product news online, as soon as it’s ready, and not necessarily at a tradeshow.

“Finally, the past few years have been a tough time for the industry and people are travelling less. So while tradeshows remain important, we have had to make some choices as to where we invest and why. Many have asked us to bring back the user event and so this year we thought we would invest here instead.”

Read the current exhibitor line-up for Siggraph 2013