Autodesk and Bentley Advance A/E/C Software Interoperability

During a surprise joint announcement Tuesday, two competing vendors of design and analysis software have agreed to exchange software libraries and support each other’s application programming interface tools to improve interoperability between the two products.

The design tools of Autodesk, San Rafael, Calif., and Bentley Systems, Exton, Pa., are often used by project collaborators, who have long complained of limited compatibility when exchanging designs between platforms.

“Interoperability is a daily struggle when working with BIM,” said Derek Cunz of Mortenson’s Denver office, which currently uses Autodesk. “This announcement brings translation as an opportunity, and brings us closer to finding a neutral file form to avoid future issues with communication.”

A 2004 study by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology found that users bear direct costs of almost $16 billion annually from time wasted because of inadequate A/E/C software interoperability.

“Bentley and Autodesk share a goal of enabling the creation and operations of better-performing infrastructure,” said Greg Bentley, CEO of 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 A/E/C community can better serve us all.”

With this agreement, the companies aim to improve A/E/C workflows by enabling broader reuse of information generated during the design, construction and operation of buildings and infrastructures and by enhancing the ability of project teams to choose among multiple software sources.

“By virtue of this agreement, and the interoperable offerings that it will enable, A/E/C firms will be free to employ software tools of choice from either Autodesk or Bentley to accept or submit either DWG or DGN files,” the two companies said in their joint statement. “By improving fidelity of work shared between the two file formats, users will be able to focus on being creative and getting work done, rather than being constrained by file compatibility considerations.”

Interoperability has emerged as a critical issue for users of design and engineering software and has hindered the development of building information modeling.

Patrick MacLeamy, a founder and current chair of the International Alliance for Interoperability and CEO of the global architectural firm HOK, calls the move “an important step toward enabling A/E/C information to be more broadly shared, increasing the value of BIM to our clients.”

“There are so many exciting things happening with new ways to design and communicate a project that interoperability is just one challenge we face,” said Cunz. “We are definitely in a better position today and this is a welcome move.”