With a twinge of sadness, we’re reporting that the Discreet name is now history. As such there will be no separate company ‘Discreet’ – only Autodesk Media and Entertainment division. We sat down with some employees of the company formerly known as discreet and asked what impact this would have on customers and why the change? We also have some fun and visually take a look back at the evolution of a company image from on that exuded creativity and a shared
The company formerly known as Discreet has now been fully absorbed into their parent company Autodesk. The company will remain in Canada and the 3D Max staff have been moved to Montreal from San Francisco. The company will no longer be an independent company with a separate general manager and will now be a division called Autodesk Media and Entertainment. Autodesk is a US$1.2B company who have many vertical markets but the feel they are just seen as a CAD company and think discreet can change that. When we spoke to discreet this week, it became apparent that Autodesk’s senior execs see discreet as providing Autodesk with sex appeal and Hollywood glamour.
For a long time industry insiders were predicting that discreet would be spun off as either a management buy out or part of a venture capitalist funded merger with Alias. Alias recently broke from SGI funded in part by Canadian Pension Funds. Head of Product Marketing Maurice Patel explains “this puts to bed the rumours that discreet will be sold”. Patel indicated that the new division would be fully integrated into Autodesk who sees itself as first and foremost a software company.
According to Patel, discreet had the best year on record, last year. All product areas were strong, new releases are coming along well. Lustre in particular was very sold with 55 lustres now sold worldwide. Lustre, like flame, will now all be rebranded. From now on, the product name will now include the word discreet for all the systems products. As in “discreet lustre” or “discreet flame”. However, any new products will simply carry only the Autodesk moniker.
Customers will still deal with the same sales staff, but most departments inside discreet are experiencing some degree of change. Internally, the company was split into three units. Roughly systems, desktop and animation are all now just one unit. A new central unit called the Image Science team is being established for image processing research. This group will provide core image processing technology to any and all product lines and will tackle getting Discreet back to being a force in new technology innovations. Discreet admits that they have fallen behind in several areas of image processing research. While senior management remains unchanged, the marketing department has changed a lot and training is rumoured to be next. In the marketing department, longtime employee Leigh Pasqueira left in January and Melanie Ball departed the company within the last month.
The move to change discreet is actually part of a larger rebranding for Autodesk itself, which will be rolling out new logos and new branding across all divisions and all aspects of the company, this process started several months ago with a major internal review and will continue over the coming months.
At NAB while many of the guides or maps may still indicate discreet, the booth will be Autodesk.