Bill Desowitz: So, now that we're still digesting this surprising news, let's begin with how this acquisition came about.

Marc Stevens: As you know, at the beginning of the year, Avid's new executive team came on board and they obviously looked at a new strategic direction for the company, doing their analysis about the markets that they want to be in. Clearly, they made a decision about focusing on their core video editing and audio markets, and while I think they saw the 3D market as a good opportunity and had a lot of respect for the products that we are doing and the talent and the team, we reached a mutual conclusion that without the right focus and putting everything that's needed behind what we have, that we really wouldn't reach the full potential with the assets that we have. And if you look at the industry and what's going on: Adobe, or Intel or NVIDIA or Microsoft or Google all making big investments in 3D, that we realized that it would be better served for Softimage and Avid to find the right home for it so it could really prosper moving forward.

So that kicked off a process that Avid went through, which was very extensive, talking to a significant number of people over an extended period of time. And that really late in the process, Marc and I had a chance to talk about where the market is evolving and where the challenges and opportunities were, and we realized that we shared a lot of common ground. As we progressed in our discussions, we realized that we were also working on very complementary things strategically and that moving forward, working together, we could bring better solutions to the customers faster than each going at it independently.

Marc Petit: Let me elaborate on our shared vision, which is the realization that the 3D market is going through a lot of transformations. And those transformations have to do with interactive 3D and run-time technologies because they are completely changing the game. And not only the gaming industry but also in film, which is using previsualization and realtime game technology, and in design visualization, where people want to experience their design with the quality of a game console. And we believe with the progress and the promise of the hardware of tomorrow, the online 3D experience will be similar to what we have today with game consoles. Also, it means a lot for entertainment, for the online shopping experience, the design experience. The designing of cars should be like Gran Turismo: attractive, immersive, photorealistic, realtime visualization and simulation. So Marc and I realized we had this shared vision but were attacking the problems from two different angles and we had a lot of complementary aspects.

We know this announcement created a little bit of a shock because when you take a pure asset creation approach, effectively between our products, the vast majority of assets for game companies and film companies belong to our two systems. But there are far bigger challenges than asset creation, and it's a green field out there. And that's our motivation.

BD: So let's discuss the roadmap you are going to now develop together.

MP: I think there are two angles: One is being able to offer production teams end-to-end solutions and we know that people have strong emotional ties with their products. We want to allow the base to choose with passion, which we experienced with Maya and Max, and we're going to keep doing it with Maya, Max and XSI. And also we will sharpen our focus on interoperability so production teams can work efficiently together even though they aren't using the same tools. And that's a reality of today's production process. People use a ton of tools -- in-house tools, tools from particular vendors -- and technologies like FBX are starting to have a proven track record of helping build productive hybrid environments. So we're committed to choice and interoperability in the short-term. Softimage customers can have the value of more products, and Face Robot can be made available more widely to the installed bases.

And there is this other aspect, which is tools for offering interactive 3D. Remember when we announced the Kynogon acquisition a while back getting ourselves the AI technology, working on our own character animation technology, and Marc and his team with ICE are working on their own very complementary character animation technology, so we think we can get very quickly innovate interactive characters and environments in that domain. And those are as relevant in film and design visualization as they are in gaming. And we believe that our combined teams would really crack intelligent characters.