BIM Busters - Closed BIM Interoperability
Thoughts on Autodesk's and Nemetschek's agreement on interoperability.
Recently, I read that Nemetschek and Autodesk agreed to make their data interoperable or at least share their proprietary file formats. That's a great idea, but I see it as:
Nothing more than marketing or misdirection to buy time.
An answer to the potential fret of the growing OpenBIM community providing easier-to-use resources as of the open source community, e.g., with speckle solving this interoperability issue through a neutral interface.
It is less technical than a business case challenge.
The Technological Challenge
The technical challenge of making their tools (entirely) interoperable is not trivial, but it could be solvable with enough resources. A simple geometry, e.g., a column, can be easily translated from one software to another. It has a base shape and a height, and it knows it's a column in the respective tool. When looking at the metadata, it is already becoming more challenging. All the attributes used for further analysis need to be mapped. But with some effort imaginable.
The cases where the modeling logic differs are more tricky. For example, walls in Alplan/Archicad can be multilayered, whereas Revit has a more single-layer modeling strategy.
Last, we have elements with advanced parametric logic, like windows and doors. Translating different parametric logics is quite challenging without an overall standard.
So, writing a sentence and saying they will do it is one thing; as you see, doing it needs resources. And even:
Inside their respective products, the two companies currently don’t manage/support interoperability.
With the available open standards like IFC and gbXML they don’t manage (As I know through my work with the abstractBIM).
So will this change with the agreement? Is there a business interest behind it?
The Business Case Behind Interoperability
Revit and Nemetschek's products are major software tools for the AEC industry. While Autodesk dominates the worldwide market, Nemetschek has the leading market share in Europe. The peak time of their main BIM tools is over; they were developed with plan generation in mind (not virtual construction). Although BIM has gained ground, CAD still dominates the industry. So, because these tools are old and carry a vast technical debt, yet the market is not yet saturated, the company's strategy is to milk them for as long as possible. To do so, they buy any possible competitor with their deep pockets to either control/destroy a potential threat or to secure the next big thing. Like any big company, their core business is marketing and sales, not innovation.
This announcement is not (only) about importing the respective files in the other tool. I see this announcement as part of Autodesk's cloud platform (APS) strategy, inspired by Microsoft Azure and Amazon's AWS cloud infrastructure. It's about becoming a platform, owning it, and securing future value generation. When you own the platform, the user-facing parts (apps) become interchangeable, and as with every platform, size matters, so it makes sense to collaborate on the foundational technology and bring as many competitors as possible on board (You can get Google Maps on the apple app store).
This means that the CAD/BIM Software we are used to will also change. We will move away from monolithic software and towards smaller specialist tools built on this platform technology. This makes developing single applications easier. On the other hand, customers will have to navigate its complexity. The platform's lock-in effect will become even more significant, and the provider will have absolute power as he controls access.
Customers already see that when they want to open old Revit files or don't want to pay for access to cloud storage.
About the Future
I hope the industry's big players will be inspired by other technological companies that build on top of open standards or even substantially support the development of these open standards. Especially in light of the fractured market and small company size in the AEC industry, it's hard to believe that software company consolidation will benefit the customer and enable us to design and build better buildings.
So, it will be our responsibility as customers to voice our needs and pick the right tools. What is your take on the announcement?