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speaks louder than words. Openness has become a common theme for Autodesk and the definition of openness could be debated. But Anagnost was emphatic, “We’ve reached out to embrace all the important standards. IFC, obviously is something we’re leaning pretty heavily into. We believe this is important. We don’t believe open standards can do everything, they never do, but they’re critical to catalysing the transformation that I’ve been talking about in the industry. “Without the support of open standards, we can’t get the whole industry wrapping around what the future looks like, and how these workflows should work in the future. It’s critical that we’re open, that we support open standards, that people get more APIs of the data that we create, so that they can do things with them. Otherwise, we’re not really going to accelerate this transformation. It’s still early in the journey. We’re not done yet, but we’re making lots of progress.” Anagnost also explained that he knew open APIs would mean competitors would ‘consume data from his world into their world’ and he said he was OK with that. If they had reciprocal open APIs, Autodesk will talk to them. “We will always be living in a heterogeneous world. So, the more we embrace the APIs, and the more we embrace the connectivity, the better off we’ll all be.” Anagnost doubled down, “We’re not going to stop anybody from using the
environment, the way they are, we’re just determined to be better than them.” In its first and most common incarnation, IFC is a file-based format, and historically a very low common denominator. It has improved with each revision, but still can be the source of great frustration. Autodesk’s implementation of IFC in Revit developed a negative reputation, but last year Autodesk licensed the Open Design Alliance’s (ODA’s) IFC libraries which, once implemented, should hopefully raise its game. The bigger issue is the potential trap of being owned by a software vendor. With all your data in their cloud, is it easy to leave? In the future we will probably be less worried about file exchange and more concerned about depth of integrations between AEC ‘cloud islands’ of data and capability. While there is a big issue about openness between competing products, Autodesk with its historic ‘code of many colours’ had data interoperability problems between its own applications. With industries like manufacturing and AEC converging, not being able to connect designs between important disciplines is not going to be an option. Here again, Autodesk is looking to use Forge and standardisation to remove its in-house silos of design data. Amy Bunszel, executive vice president of Autodesk’s AEC design solutions stated that the company was using Forge to
build fluent workflows between Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Inventor, the mechanical CAD tool. “With Forge we are unlocking Revit data for use in nonAutodesk applications. Just like data flows between Revit and Inventor, soon Revit data will pass directly to Microsoft Power Automate, making BIM data available for a wide variety of uses, giving granular visibility into projects and making it easier to supply up-to-date information to partners without having to pass files back and forth. If an object parameter changes in a model, a supplier won’t have to dig through a huge file to find the change. Instead, designers will be able to create an automation to instantly give their supplier the exact information they need. That’s just one example. But with Revit data unlocked, you will not be limited to the constraints of a proprietary file format.”
Customers & Forge With the target audience for the Forge message at Autodesk University being customers, it was intriguing to hear Autodesk pitching Forge as a consumerlevel tool. Looking back, AutoCAD eventually supported a plethora of APIs (Arx, Lisp etc.), but few customers went beyond creating simple scripting macros. Forge would surely only appeal to a minority? Anagnost responded, “In terms of how many customers are going to natively build off Forge, it’s going to be 20% of cus-
The origins of Autodesk Forge Computer science usually advances through evolutionary phases. Examples of the evolutionary approach would be updated Operating Systems (Windows 3.1 to Windows NT), increases in the number of transistors in CPUs, or hardware refinements such as Solid State Drive (SSDs) over Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Small to medium technology changes which occur year to year might not seem significant but, over five years, looking back we can see progress. Looking inside any computer, you are just seeing the latest instalment in open warfare between thousands of
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hardware and software developers to go faster, do more, to be the best. It’s always amazed me how we grow and adapt with this computer arms race, changing the way we work and the structures of how our data is organised. Who would have thought those early 2,800 baud modems would eventually revolutionise phones, shopping and allow us all to work at home during a pandemic, while Boris Johnson partied, and others tracked down online supplies of horse worming pills? However, less frequently, computing will see generational change, in which some-
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thing happens which turns existing paradigms on its head. In CAD, the move from expensive UNIX systems to DOS / Windows PCs provided an opportunity for a startup called Solidworks to create a solid modelling application which undermined the highly expensive and dominant UNIX-based CAD software developers. Like the dinosaurs, some became extinct. The Forge platform has been out in the open for seven years and has its origins in the development of Autodesk Fusion 360, which, amazingly, was launched back in 2013. Fusion was Autodesk’s
third major attempt to create a product design system for manufacturing (its first being Mechanical Desktop, based on AutoCAD, and then Inventor). In manufacturing, Autodesk was always, volume wise, fourth behind the main pack of Dassault Systèmes (Catia, Solidworks), Siemens (NX, Solid Edge) and PTC (Pro/Engineer, Creo, Onshape). The management at Autodesk believed that whoever would be first to deliver on the next generational change point, from desktop to cloud, would be the new dominant player. Autodesk started to develop
a new cloud-capable manufacturing tool which became Fusion 360. With that work, Autodesk experimented and formulated how a cloudbased application with a thin desktop client should be architected. Anagnost commented on this synergy, “Forge, and its relationship with Fusion, is quite deep and quite intense and there’s more Forge integrations with Fusion than there are with any other stack inside the company right now. Forge is playing a critical role in enabling simultaneous collaboration across various capabilities and providing fluidity of the Fusion
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03/02/2022 15:42
