Autodesk and Bentley’s Unprecedented Interoperability Agreement

On Tuesday, July 8, 2008, the unthinkable happened. Autodesk and Bentley hosted a joint press conference at which they announced an agreement to expand interoperability between their respective portfolios of AEC software. They are proposing to accomplish this by directly working with each other's file formats and integrating their applications through the use of their APIs. I found this news not just unbelievable but extremely odd, given the combative relationship the two companies have had for so many years. This month's "Building the Future" article takes a look back at their past relationship characterized by many disagreements and criticisms, and provides an analysis of the new interoperability agreement, including both the overt and possible underlying motivations that may have led to it.

Coming up next is a review of DProfiler, a "macro model" BIM solution that can be used at the planning and conceptual design phase to get an accurate cost estimate of a proposed design. It does this by integrating RS Means within the application, with over 20,000 assembly cost databases that are pulled immediately to provide an interactive cost estimate on the fly as you are modeling the design. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, since it is targeted towards the conceptual design stage. It should be interesting to see not only how it works but also how it compares with the more common BIM applications such as Revit, Bentley, and ArchiCAD.

Another product that will be reviewed this month is the recently released Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, which now includes the ability to unify the widest range of content in a PDF Portfolio, create interactive presentations with Adobe Presenter software, easily convert and share video in PDF, create PDF maps, convert any 2D and 3D designs to PDF, and enjoy expanded 3D capabilities with the new Adobe 3D Reviewer.

The Viewpoint series returns with an article entitled "BIM: When Will It Enter “The Ours” Zone?" by Stewart Carroll of Beck Technology, and in the Tips and Tricks series, we will have tutorials on Revit as well as ArchiCAD.

Thank you for your interest, and do continue to check out both the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get information about the technology providers in AEC.

Lachmi Khemlani, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor, AECbytes

July 2008