On July 18, Esri President Dangermond and Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost promised more data interoperability between Esri’s Graphical Information Systems (GIS) maps and 2D models and 3D Building Information Modeling (BIM) used by Autodesk AEC customers to design buildings and infrastructure and manage project delivery.
On June 17, Esri announced new read-in support in the latest version of its flagship GIS product, ArcGIS Pro, for BIM and CAD elements in road, rail and site modeling workflows that incorporate technology ‘Autodesk. This is the first time that elements of Autodesk authoring tools such as Civil 3D and Revit Toposolids can be used in third-party products. It’s part of a partnership first announced in 2018 between the two companies to share their data across platforms.
“We’ve done core work, we’ve done the product integration work, we’ve done the file-level work, where we’re really doing database-level integrations,” Anagnost told a user conference Esri in San Diego. “You can edit GIS data inside AutoCAD. We’ve absorbed ArcGIS workflows, in what we do, they’re important and fundamental things… The next step now is to work on specific workflows that deliver specific value for certain types of customers”.
Anagnost said transportation engineers, architects and construction professionals are three classes of such customers.
“We’re building personal relationships at the engineering level,” Dangermond said. “We can’t really talk about it in detail, but they’re making improvements and also looking at next year and the year after that. ArcGIS GeoBIM [Esri’s GIS-to-BIM translator product] is cloud-to-cloud integration. What we’ve seen this week is that our customers are starting to take this whole cloud strategy and tie their stuff into it.”
Anagnost added that what comes out of the partnership in the coming years will be a combination of top-down workflows that the two companies have identified and what he called “bottom-up enthusiasm” that will come from questions from clients and the workflows of engineers and architects. they have done for themselves.
“You’ve seen some of the things we’ve done with highway workflows where we’ve integrated data that’s no longer in the file, but it’s kept elsewhere and that data goes in and affects the design, but it doesn’t.” It does not weigh the design [coming],” he said.
Both Anagnost and Dangermond said that aside from vendor relationships with Microsoft and AWS, the vertical-to-vertical relationship between Autodesk and Esri is the most important with the most resources dedicated to their respective companies.
Adam Horn, HNTB’s Integrated Civil Solutions Section Leader, said these integrations are necessary for the digital transformation of the entire industry and specifically to HNTB.
“Integration without translation is something we strive for at HNTB,” Horn said. “Historically, CAD and GIS have been transformative. We have designers doing design, planners doing planning. We’re saying can we create integrated infrastructure frameworks, which we haven’t been able to do in the past, because they were a little bit disconnected. flows of work, this new framework allows us to provide a better design and planning experience.”
Horn also said that having multiple views of a transportation project, such as a 2D aerial view available in a layered GIS map, as well as a close-up 3D view with project details in a BIM model, is what HNTB engineers need today and will be part of the eventual workflow that will emerge from this digital transformation.
