It’s been a busy time for Autodesk over the last month-plus, with the make and design software provider announcing new updates, some of which being part of the Revit 2025 release, while also acquiring a 3D mesh software provider and releasing their annual State of Design and Make Report. They may have saved their biggest news for Wednesday, though.
The company announced this week that they had reached an interoperability agreement with the Nemetschek Group, one of the world’s leading AEC/O software providers who owns properties such as Graphisoft, Bluebeam, and Vectorworks, among others. For their part, this announcement comes on the heels of a recently announced partnership between the Nemetschek Group and Hexagon.
The companies say that this agreement will “enhance existing interoperability between the two companies’ industry cloud and desktop products and improve the fluent exchange of information across solutions.”
As far as the function of this agreement, things will surely evolve as the two industry giants hone in on what their customers want to derive from this interoperability, but at its base level it involves connecting Nemetschek’s cloud products with Autodesk’s. More specifically, they’ll connect dTwin, Bluebeam Cloud, BIMcloud, and BIMplus industry clouds to Autodesk’s industry clouds – this would be Forma, Fusion, and Flow – as well as their design solutions, all through Autodesk Platform Services (APS), which is a set of open APIs and web services. The companies say the connections will “enable customers and partners to connect their data and capabilities across the respective solutions so users can focus on optimizing their projects with automation, AI, and insight.”
With the agreement in place, the two companies will now provide mutual access to these APIs and industry clouds, which will give industry developers access to solutions from both sides. This includes, on the Nemetschek side, solutions like Allplan, Archicad, Bluebeam, Maxon One, and Vectorworks; from Autodesk’s side, the solutions include AutoCAD, Revit, 3ds Max and Maya, along with platforms like Autodesk Forma and Autodesk Construction Cloud. They say this will enable them to “improve upon existing data exchanges and open new data-centric workflows that span disciplines and industries.”
In their announcement of the news, the companies spoke to the importance of open industry standards – including openBIM by buildingSMART – to improve accessibility of BIM tools, among other reasons. As noted above, this also comes alongside plenty of other movements along these lines from these two companies, most notably Nemetschek’s partnership with Hexagon. It’s fair to suspect that these types of agreements will become more common as industry professionals continue to seek fewer siloed workflows to make their systems more streamlined.
While the AEC industry has had a reputation of being tech-averse, those in the industry know that adoption has been steadily rising for a while now, and it seems we’re starting to enter a new phase in the industry’s tech cycle. First was broad adoption, which led to a bevy of new tools being released for specific problems experienced by professionals. Those new tools were then, in turn, acquired and added to the offerings of larger companies, including Autodesk and Nemetschek. Still, professionals didn’t have a way to cleanly and efficiently work between major platforms, which is leading to this current trend of interoperability and integration between industry leaders.
“Autodesk is firmly committed to building open, integrated, cloud-powered solutions for our customers that unlock data and connect project teams,” said Amy Bunszel, Executive Vice President, Architecture, Engineering and Construction Solutions at Autodesk, in a statement. “Extending Autodesk's cloud and desktop solutions with Nemetschek interoperability is a huge step towards optimizing our customers’ workflows and helping them generate better project outcomes.”
“Supporting openBIM, interoperability, and open industry standards is deeply rooted in the Nemetschek Group’s DNA,” added Marc Nézet, Chief Strategy Officer of the Nemetschek Group. “Our interoperability agreement with Autodesk is a historic move to give customers the ability to work in any project environment and with any software ecosystem, ultimately resulting in a better built world.”
