Bentley and AutoDesk will work together

At a press conference, these two software providers announced an agreement to expand interoperability among its architectural, engineering and construction portfolios known by its acronym in English AEC. Some time ago we talked about the equivalences between both technologies; and according to this good news, AutoDesk and Bentley they will exchange their libraries, including RealDWG to implement the ability to read and write in both dgn or dwg formats regardless of the platform they are working on.

This seems to me one of the best news I've heard, especially since at this point neither AutoCAD with his 25 years and Microstation with its 27 (not including the previous 11) will back down after having positioned themselves very well and having survived the battle of time, which in technologies is very short. To date, Microstation had managed to read and write natively on the dwg format and AutoCAD was already capable of importing a dgn file, but what is intended is that both formats have the same construction principle not only in the basic application but also in different AEC specializations, possibly create a standard that can meet OGC standards as a vector handling format.

Additionally, the two companies will facilitate the process flows between their architectural, engineering and construction applications in order to reciprocally support their programming interfaces (APIs). With this arrangement, both Bentley and AutoDesk could allow a project to be carried on different platforms, for example the entire layer 2d of a plan could be built in AutoCAD, but keep the 3D animation on Bentley Architecture.

Interoperability has had an important boom for users of design and engineering platforms, although until now we saw it stronger in the geospatial line. A 2004 study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the direct costs for time spent on platforms with inadequate interoperability is about $ 16 billion annually !!!

The intention is that users dedicate themselves to work, to create, to smoke instead of being complicated in terms of file format or how they will distribute it.

Imagine working with AutoDesk Revit, and being able to have a subsidiary company working in Bentley STAAD, on a single format, with NavisWorks data management and deployed to the web by ProjectWise ... wow !!!, this changes the same history.

This gesture seems very good to me, especially from AutoDesk, which although it has the largest share of the market, recognizes that many customers use the advantages of both platforms because they are finally those who know how to get the most out of it.