Division also appoints award-winning senior director of marketing to lead product management, marketing, and business development.

Autodesk Inc. formally announced the formation of a Global GIS Customer Council (GCC) to provide a collective customer voice to integrate customer needs with Autodesk GIS products, services, and strategic direction worldwide. Autodesk also announced it has appointed Ernesto Diaz senior director of marketing for the GIS Solutions Division.

Global GIS Customer Council
The GCC consists of 15 global Autodesk customers from the mapping, civil design and infrastructure management markets in Brazil, England, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway and the United States. The GCC plans to meet annually at Autodesk University where council members will provide professional insight from their respective markets. Personal interaction also occurs throughout the year on an informal basis.

Ernesto Diaz
In his new role as Senior Director of Marketing for GIS Solutions Division, Diaz will work closely with Diamond and the GCC to lead the GIS product management, industry and product marketing and business development teams. Diaz, who has extensive experience managing global vendor and partner relationships, joins Autodesk from Lucent Technologies Inc., where he was the director of product and offer management for the company’s mobility business. At Lucent, Diaz led the operations of three cross-functional teams accountable for product and strategic marketing management for new product introduction in the United States and Europe.

Diaz has extensive experience in the telecommunications industry, including work as a systems engineer at AT&T International. Diaz began his career in Venezuela in 1988 as a project engineer for Bechtel. During his career, Diaz has received numerous awards, including the Bell Labs President's Silver Award for outstanding innovation and technical excellence and the Lucent Award for Excellence for outstanding leadership and ethics.

Diaz holds a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, where his thesis won a National Prize (3rd place in the Telecommunications Area), and received his Industrial Engineering Professional Certification for the European Union from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in Spain. He is also a graduate of the Berkeley Executive Program at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.