Autodesk and Bentley held a joint press conference today to announce an agreement that will expand interoperability between their various products. The plan calls for a sharing of software libraries so that each will have the ability to read and write respective DWG and DGN formats. The companies also plan to facilitate better workflows through each other’s products with reciprocal use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The aim is for broader reuse of information throughout the design, construction and operation of buildings and infrastructure.

As to the timing of the move, both companies acknowledged that the rapid evolution of the AEC workflow toward globalized project teams has necessitated better interoperability, as has the move toward a BIM design environment. Greg Bentley commented that BIM is not a format, but a process that adds intelligence to the model throughout the design, build and operate cycles and this agreement stands to ensure reliable and consistent data throughout the BIM process.

There was mention of the 2004 study by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology that found that users bear direct costs of almost $16 billion annually from time wasted due to inadequate AEC software interoperability. Greg Bentley pointed out that this report doesn’t address the opportunity cost that is even larger.

“At Bentley, our 3,000 colleagues are wholly dedicated to sustaining infrastructure, which we define as everything we build to sustain our planet,” said Bentley. “The global requirement for that has never loomed so large–infrastructure safety and security, resource efficient economic development, energy self sufficiency, environmental resilience, and so forth. The stakes are higher than ever and the economic benefits are higher than ever.”

There was an acknowledgment of project backlogs due to a reduction in trained personnel and the current software bottlenecks due to a lack of interoperability. Firms are addressing backlogs with increasingly distributed teams, and the aim of these software vendors is to reduce the bottleneck so that the firms can recover time wasted because AEC information hasn’t flowed between project teams and processes.

“Autodesk shares a vision for the industry where technology never distracts, but instead facilitates, architects, engineers, builders, owners and government agencies to work seamlessly together, and this announcement facilitates that vision,” said Jay Bhatt, senior vice president, Autodesk AEC Solutions. “We recognize that customers work in a mix of Autodesk and Bentley products to meet deliverable and project workflow requirements, and often too much time spent converting and massaging data between DWG and DGN formats. The agreement will help us better support the firms so that they can spend more time on higher value work.”

Among the things that will become possible now that weren’t available before:

  • Native code from both Autodesk and Bentley, each desktop can read and write DGN and DWG.
  • Full and trusted comprehension of the formats because each product contains the library of the others format.
  • Realtime workflow interoperability between product sets through the use of each others APIs.

The benefits at the project level are reuse of information at various stages of the project, with resources freed up to produce better work. The move to interoperability is seen as an opportunity for both companies to sell more products, with users gaining a wider choice of software tools without having to worry about compatibility with delivery formats.

Bentley has become Autodesk’s largest development partner, largely through acquisition, and a portion of this development can be attributed to an increasing need for the companies to work together to support existing products. The broader development community stands to benefit some from this announcement, because the increased interoperability between the products enhances workflows and could lead to more solutions-oriented packaging.

On hand throughout the call were Norbert Young, president of McGraw-Hill Construction and former chairman of the International Alliance for Interoperability in North America and Patrick MacLeamy, CEO of global architectural firm HOK and a founder and current chairman of the International Alliance for Interoperability. Both companies expressed a gratitude to both gentlemen and their organizations for leadership and vision to help spur this interoperability effort.

The move to BIM necessitates an environment and ecosystem of information exchange and collaboration that ultimately will result in real-time workflows for better decision support. Open standards may eventually grow to help address BIM interoperability issues broader than just data exchange between these proprietary formats. With this announcement, it becomes feasible for those that use these two vendor’s products to create better workflows and design decisions, and we all stand to benefit.

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