Responding to customers who have been pushing them for greater workflow efficiencies when using their products together, Autodesk and Trimble have entered into an interoperability agreement that enables both companies to share Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and developer tools for products in their respective portfolios.
The collaboration is also meant to show each company’s commitment to supporting open industry standards such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), and Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie).
Autodesk and Trimble have similar arrangements with Bentley, and Autodesk recently struck an agreement on the manufacturing side with Siemens.
“We want to allow our customers to focus more on projects and spend less time moving data between Autodesk and Trimble products,” explains Jim Lynch, Vice President for AEC Product Development at Autodesk’s Boston office. He says this agreement will help “fill the API gaps.”
Tighter product-to-product integration can enable AEC users to share models, project files, and allow for the reuse of information throughout all phases of a project.
Lynch says the two companies have been working on this agreement for more than a year. His main contact at Trimble was its Vice President Bryn Fosburgh. Another key person in developing this agreement was Nicolas Mangon, Vice President of AEC Strategy and Marketing at Autodesk.
Lynch tells BD+C that this agreement does not entail any financial arrangement between the two suppliers, nor does he anticipate that either company would need to set up a separate team or department.
“Trimble benefits by our customers benefiting,” says Mark Sawyer, General Manager of Trimble’s General Contractor/Construction Management division.
Sawyer adds that going forward, each company will have access to the other’s APIs to test. Trimble also has an advisory group of customers that is likely to be involved in the testing.
Lynch expects that the industry will continue to pressure software vendors to develop products that integrate seamlessly. Sawyer agrees, and thinks the most immediate streamlining will be evident in document and data management, and BIM-in-field. But, he cautions, don’t expect interoperability agreements such as Autodesk-Trimble to be “wildly prolific,” either.
Related Stories
| Nov 25, 2013
Electronic plan review: Coming soon to a city near you?
With all the effort AEC professionals put into leveraging technology to communicate digitally on projects, it is a shame that there is often one major road block that becomes the paper in their otherwise “paperless” project: the local city planning and permitting department.
| Nov 22, 2013
Kieran Timberlake, PE International develop BIM tool for green building life cycle assessment
Kieran Timberlake and PE International have developed Tally, an analysis tool to help BIM users keep better score of their projects’ complete environmental footprints.
| Nov 8, 2013
Can Big Data help building owners slash op-ex budgets?
Real estate services giant Jones Lang LaSalle set out to answer these questions when it partnered with Pacific Controls to develop IntelliCommand, a 24/7 real-time remote monitoring and control service for its commercial real estate owner clients.
| Oct 30, 2013
Why are companies forcing people back to the office?
For a while now companies have been advised that flexibility is a key component to a successful workplace strategy, with remote working being a big consideration. But some argue that we’ve moved the needle too far toward a “work anywhere” culture.
| Oct 30, 2013
11 hot BIM/VDC topics for 2013
If you like to geek out on building information modeling and virtual design and construction, you should enjoy this overview of the top BIM/VDC topics.
| Oct 18, 2013
Meet the winners of BD+C's $5,000 Vision U40 Competition
Fifteen teams competed last week in the first annual Vision U40 Competition at BD+C's Under 40 Leadership Summit in San Francisco. Here are the five winning teams, including the $3,000 grand prize honorees.
| Oct 18, 2013
A picture’s worth a thousand words… if you can find it
Photographs are becoming more essential to project communication and documentation. Recently, I sat in a local airport integration project meeting in which the owner outlined their expectation for construction documentation. One of the first requirements was to provide photographs throughout the building process.
Sponsored | | Oct 7, 2013
Bridging the digital divide between the BIM haves and have nots
There's no doubt that BIM is the future of design. But for many firms, finding a bridge to access rich model data and share it with those typically left on the sidelines can be the difference between winning a bid or not.
| Oct 2, 2013
Corporate HQ in 10 months made possible with BIM coordination
An integrated Building Team uses BIM/VDC to convert a 1940s-era industrial building into a flashy new headquarters for Hillshire Brands in a matter of months.
| Sep 26, 2013
Mobilizing your job site to achieve a paperless project: fact or fiction?
True mobility in the field has rapidly evolved from lock-box kiosks on each floor to laptops on rolling carts to tablets and iPads loaded with drawings sets stored in the cloud. And WiFi-ready job sites have gone from “nice to have” to “must have” status in just a little over a year.