Autodesk and Bentley—Working Together
July 17, 2008
In what some in the industry might classify as a shocking move, Autodesk, www.autodesk.com, San Rafael, Calif., and Bentley Systems, www.bentley.com, Exton, Pa., announced an agreement to expand interoperability between their respective portfolios of AEC software.
At a joint press conference, the two companies said they will exchange software libraries, including Autodesk RealDWG, to improve the ability to read and write the companies’ respective DWG and DGN formats in mixed environments with greater reliability.
Also, work process interoperability between the AEC applications will be further facilitated by the mutual use of available APIs (application programming interfaces). This means project teams can use a combination of products from both companies within integrated workflows.
At its core, this announcement means better interoperability in a mixed environment. In other words, AEC firms should not feel constrained to using either Autodesk or Bentley products to accept or submit files—the two will work together.
“Bentley and Autodesk share a goal of enabling the creation and operations of better-performing infrastructure,” says Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems. “Realizing that our mutual users bear unnecessary costs resulting from lack of interoperability, we came together to finally make information reuse the norm. By raising its sights beyond file format issues, the resource-constrained AEC community can better serve us all.”
The key note about this interoperability agreement is the fact the two vendors are using APIs and not IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) from the Intl. Alliance for Interoperability (IAI), www.iai-international.org. The intent of the IFCs is to initiate open standards across the industry.