Score one for consumers — Bentley and Autodesk have struck a cross-licensing agreement that will allow interoperability between the two company’s software products.

The agreement, details of which are in this press release from Autodesk, calls for the two software giants to exchange their software libraries that write the file formats, as well as share their publicly available APIs.

Bentley is Autodesk’s largest development partner and has built numerous products over the years that work on or with AutoCAD and support its DWG file format.

However, the interoperability agreement “will ensure a higher fidelity and trust in the file formats,” Chris Barren, vice president of marketing for Bentley, said in an interview with ConstructionSoftwareReview.com “The alternative was getting the applications to translate the files from one format to another. Even when they’re really good translations, if the text is a couple pixels off, you can spend a lot of time fixing that.”

On the surface, it may seem odd that two competing firms like Autodesk and Bentley would team up on a venture like this. However, both companies recognize that, as projects become more advanced from an integrated project delivery standpoint, different contracting teams will be using a variety of software offerings. Now, because of this pact, consumers will not have to worry if an Autodesk DWG or Bentley DGN file will export precisely — it just will.

Lack of construction software interoperability has been an obstacle for the industry for years and, according to a recent McGraw-Hill report, it is costing the industry some $36 billion a year.

According to Noah Cole, from Autodesk’s Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) marketing department, this agreement with Bentley is a chance to help the industry down the road. “Looking at construction, most buildings are still being built with blueprints. But, as the industry moves to digital models and BIM, they’re going to have to rely on modeling,” he said. “If they can’t read the file, they have to remodel or redraft it, which is time-consuming and expensive — plus it lends itself to errors.”

While both companies announced the interpretability agreement, they are still in the midst of implementing it. They acknowledge that it may take some time, but, Barren stated that Bentley is looking to finalize it “not too far in the next year.”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Construction industry news and trends, CAD software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.