You may recall a government report late last year claimed that the lack of efficiency and accuracy in data exchange adds $15.8 billion to the overall cost of designing, engineering, building and operating facilities.

Bentley has weighed in on the matter, making accusations that Autodesk’s policies are responsible for $1 billion of that number. In Bentley’s publication BE Magazine, Tony Flynn enumerates what Autodesk is doing wrong: 1) forced obsolescence/upgrading of software; 2) attack on an accepted standard – Adobe PDF; and 3) creation of non-interoperable design platforms. Thus far Autodesk has not chosen to reply, but rest assured a response will follow.

This is an important issue as the industry moves toward ‘smart’ data, which must be read by multiple software packages to be truly useful. See http://www.opendesign.com for more on the call for open standards in data exchange.

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