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Asian infrastructure growth will continue to drive the market for spatial information over the next decade.

This would seem to be the take home message from an address to World Press Day in Sydney from Patrick Williams, head of Autodesk operations in the Asia Pacific. The event is an opportunity for executives in the company to inform the public about its long-term plans.

The company has eight million users, divided roughly equally between Europe, the Americas and Asia. In this sense it is a truly global company. It has almost 2000 people involved in software development in Asia, with one plant in Shanghai employing about 1600 people. The remaining people are located in Singapore.

The company’s aim is to double its size in the next five years. Its current revenue is over a billion dollars.

It seems that a substantial part of that extra revenue will come from Asia. Spending on roads, airports, power stations, new water and waste water systems on the continent will most likely exceed $50 teradollars by 2020. A substantial portion of the population – several billion people – will need completely new housing.

There is increasing evidence however that doing more of what we do now will not provide for this. Environmental concerns mean that we need to find ways of living and building infrastructure that involve less energy.

How this is to be done is not obvious. But what is obvious is that it will depend in part on smarter ways of designing buildings and managing cities.

This is a second strand to the Autodesk story. Future software will not only be about visualising three dimensional models, it will be about modelling the way those models perform.

You can already see what your house will look like with a new window in one of its walls. Shortly, you will also be able to model the consequences for heating and cooling.

ASM Newsletter is distributed by e-mail every two weeks. It reports on events in the spatial industry in Asia and events outside the region which will impact on Asia.