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Competition, Consolidation, and a Little Thing Called XML

Holiday turkeys aren’t the only things going “gobble gobble” these days.

By Rande Robinson

I’m back, and in a new e-format to boot. While not a lot has happened in the AEC CADD world since my last column, there are one or two trends that truly concern me: the continuing consolidation within the industry and the industry’s promotion of XML for data exchange.

Over the last few years we have seen Intergraph sell off its AEC product lines to Bentley. We have seen Bentley gobble up products like Descartes, Inroads and GEOPAK. On the other side of the CADD world, AutoDesk has been buying up its share of the software world with the purchase of Softdesk, Revit and most recently CACIE. So where we once had heated competition between products we now have very few competing products left. For example, let’s take a quick look at how industry consolidation has affected highway design software.

Three years ago there were at least a half dozen competing highway design software packages—InRoads, GEOPAK, CACIE, Softdesk, AutoCad Land Development, IGRDS, MDX Roads—and those are just the ones that I can name off the top of my head. Today it’s a different story. Bentley Systems now own both GEOPAK and InRoads, Autodesk owns CACIE and Softdesk. IGRDs, which was an AASHTO product, has been sunset. That leaves MDX as the only product that hasn’t been bought out—yet.

Why be concerned? Well first, it pretty much stifles competition and, in my opinion, makes the remaining vendors less concerned with their customers and more concerned with their stock price. (Bentley is privately owned but has been trying to go public.)

Now I know the Big Two (AutoDesk and Bentley) say just the opposite; that by consolidating products they can provide better and more responsive customer service and support. In the short term, it might even be true. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that when there is a lack of competition things stagnate and then proceed downhill.

I hope the vendors prove me wrong, but I doubt they will. Competition between different products and vendors brought us the great tools we use today, but with Bentley now controlling approximately 94 percent of the highway design market (by my calculations), and Autodesk the rest, I fear we will see little “real” innovation over the next few years.

One thing I would recommend is hold your vendor’s feet to fire. And if they don’t deliver, “burn em” a bit!

Now onto the topic of XML, and the industry’s effort to adopt it as a data transfer standard. Over the years the biggest problem within the AEC industry has been data exchange. Every product regardless of vendor basically has used a proprietary format to store data. This is starting to change with the coming of the web, and the adoption of Visual Basic by several vendors.

The latest big thing seems to be XML, and I think this could go a long way to solving our data exchange problems. (See links at end of column if you want to learn more about XML.) Even Microsoft is talking about adopting XML for their next release of Office. In the AEC world though, I see a couple of roadblocks to XML’s implementation; the first one deals with standards, and the second one is more business oriented.

Roadblock number one is the question of which particular XML standard to adopt. Of course both AutoDesk and Bentley support different ones. Autodesk, MicroSoft and probably the majority of other AEC vendors support LandXML while Bentley has been leaning towards aecXML. I figure LandXML will likely win in the end, but it probably doesn’t matter. Some form of XML will become the defacto standard for AEC data exchange.

But roadblock number two—that is, product consolidation—might derail the whole thing. Once XML frees our design data from proprietary formats, we would be free to choose the best and cheapest programs for our design needs. In other words the CADD world would once again be a place where vendors would have to compete on features, performance, service and PRICE. Talk about something that scares the hell out of upper management at the Big Two. Come to think of it, buying up the competition makes more sense, doesn’t it?
I hope that gives everyone something to think about. Feel free to let me know what you think by dropping me a line at rjrobinson@charter.net. Since I’m writing this in December, let me wish everyone happy holidays and a prosperous new year.

Rande Robinson works for “a southern department of transportation” in CADD support, training and management. The views presented are Rande’s and are not necessarily those of any department of transportation, organization or pc-trans (although they probably should be).

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