Autodesk Joins Open Design Alliance to Fast Track Improvements to Interoperability

Open Design Alliance

September 22, 2020

Author: Amy Bunszel, Autodesk Senior Vice President, Design and Creation Products

Today, we’re pleased to share that Autodesk is becoming a member of the Open Design Alliance (ODA), a nonprofit technology consortium specializing in providing support and access to design file formats. This decision demonstrates our commitment to take meaningful steps towards improving our customers’ experience in the AEC space.

In one of my recent posts responding to some of the constructive criticism we’ve received from our architecture customers, we promised to do a better job of listening to our customers, engage in an open dialogue, and do better where we’ve fallen short. One of the areas highlighted was progress with our products on international data exchange standards, specifically the need to better support IFC, an open file format increasingly used by our AEC customers. With Autodesk's membership in the ODA, we will accelerate our progress toward supporting this need. Those of you who know the history between Autodesk and the ODA will understand the importance we put on getting this functionality to our customers at an accelerated pace.

ODA’s IFC toolkit provides complete and flexible IFC interoperability for any desktop or web-based application. The toolkit, along with ODA’s commitment to supporting new IFC standards, means we can readily integrate new versions as they become ratified, ensuring more consistent data flow and a faster, more streamlined experience.

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