What’s Beyond Revit — Anagnost on Autodesk AEC Futures

THIS ARTICLE IS ONE OF THREE FEATURES THAT discuss the topics and issues that lead up to and beyond the Revit Open Letter movement initiated in the United Kingdom. Recently, Architosh had the opportunity to talk to Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost about the open letter and fill in some of the gaps behind the concerns and consternation among those in the AEC industry—about Revit’s future.

While the other features focus on framing the predicament and re-lensing AEC futures, respectively, this article will look at Autodesk’s response—not just to all Revit architect users, but more broadly, those wishing to understand the company’s AEC vision.

Introduction

When Anagnost agreed to take my call, I framed it as an opportunity to look beyond this present moment. The one thing that readers should be aware of is that Autodesk wasn’t surprised by the open letter. “We knew there was tension in architecture, and so we had already allocated more resources for Revit development on architecture months ago—nine to twelve months ago,” says Anagnost.

He assured me that Revit architecture users should expect some key announcements, many speaking to more innovation in Revit for the architecture market. What follows are highlights from our hour-long conversation about Revit and its future, what lies ahead in the near and long term.

An explanation to the reader. My conversation with Anagnost was deep, and we covered a lot of ground. We are going to overview much of that terrain below. As we run through it, I will be making notes of where the reader can find more in-depth material slated to be published in our Xpresso newsletter next month.

Interop 101 — IFC and Files

We start with interoperability because it was not just one of the main issues of concern in the open letter but because it is the linchpin topic in the future of AEC technology. The architects in the open letter expressed and want a better commitment to IFC, an area where Anagnost admits they lag.

 

 

 

 

“Do we desire to do a better job with IFC?” Anagnost asks rhetorically, “Absolutely! Is IFC going to solve the ecosystem’s problems? Absolutely not!”

Autodesk is committed to IFC, but as Anagnost explained, it is far from being the whole or final answer to data interoperability and data exchange for the AEC industry. The company is actively working on those technologies.

“I’m a veteran of the data interoperability wars in the era of product design and engineering industry,” he says. “This is something I’ve watched play out in an industry that is much more digitally mature than AEC. And I think one thing we can all acknowledge right now—intermediate file formats are a temporary hack.”

But not just file formats like IFC, but “files” themselves are on the cutting block when it comes to the AEC industry’s future. “I think there is something we need to acknowledge right now,” he says, “that a file is a dead thing working.”

Interop and API

It is not that “files” are going away anytime soon, any more than how electric vehicles are forcing gas-based cars to disappear. Those transitions take place over decades. But the thing that was exciting to hear from Anagnost is the recognition that files are not the end game in AEC’s future.

Interop’s new dancing partner in AEC is the “API,” and the “file” is heading to the punch bowl where it will grab a drink and take a seat and be a much less frequent dancer. To make this metaphor clearer, out on the dance floor today are a bunch of files—many Revit files and a fair amount of IFC files holding hands and trying to be good partners. But the music is changing and dramatically—thanks to new technologies as we advance cloud and mobile device technology.

“It’s funny that you sent me the link on the people working on the AEC Delta Mobility project,” says Anagnost. “That’s the kind of stuff we are working on behind the scenes with Forge, this notion of both data APIs and data workflows.” Forge is Autodesk’s cloud-based developer platform. It enables both advanced users with software chops and third-party developers to build out focused digital tools that can visualize 3D models and data together and talk to Autodesk software products.

Interop and Manufacturing

Anagnost didn’t paint a super detailed picture of his statement about Forge and data APIs. However, the AEC Delta project reference suggests he means that data APIs can move specific parts of BIM models data from “digital tool” to “digital tool” without relying on sending whole Revit files or IFC files.

He also contends that part of the Quantum Project vision from its earliest stage was this very idea that APIs can enable tools to talk to each other, passing data around without the need for files. In early examples of Quantum, an architect could pass his curtain wall design to a curtain wall manufacturer and create a feedback collaboration loop speeding up the process that generally amounts to engineering review, shop drawings for scope conformity, and constructability pre-flighting. That Quantum vision addresses how manufacturing and AEC become linked.

 

 

 

 

Anagnost contends that Autodesk today possesses much of the templates needed for AEC’s transformation. “In terms of getting a glimpse of where we are going in AEC,” he suggests, “you might want to take a look at what we have done in manufacturing.”

That’s an industry on the other side of its transformation, including tools and operational workflows. Anagnost is suggesting to look at Fusion, its modern mCAD application. Without getting into the weeds on the details of how Fusion influences Revit, Anagnost suggests that Fusion as a kind of “thick client” application represents how Revit may adapt to meeting the future needs of architects as well as other AEC players.

“Fusion has a file, but it also has what is called a ‘product information model’ under it, which sounds like a ‘building information model’ but right now, a building information model has a one-to-one correspondence with a file. That’s not true in Fusion-land,” he says. Fusion is different than Revit in many ways, but that product information model sits in the cloud “between the file and the application,” he adds.

The relationship between AEC and manufacturing, between Autodesk’s tools in each space, and how they may impact and influence each other is something to unpack in our follow-up article. The big takeaway from this comparison between Fusion and Revit is that the latter may get supplemented by new AEC tools that look like the former, and they will talk to each other.

next page: Revit Futures

Revit Futures

But there is more to the future of Revit today than how Fusion may inform as a development template for not-yet-announced AEC tools that work with Revit. Another Autodesk app that may serve as a development guide to Revit is AutoCAD. If that sounds shocking, let me remind readers that when AutoCAD was announced for the Mac nearly a decade ago, (see: Architosh, “Exclusive: AutoCAD’s Fateful Return to the Mac,” 17 Dec 2010) the company embarked on a substantial recoding of the world’s most famous CAD application. Along the way, in many of our AutoCAD reviews, we have made note that many new features in AutoCAD first appeared on the Mac version and were carried over to the Windows version. This fact indexed just how transformed the code base of AutoCAD had become.

In mentioning the significance of AutoCAD, Anagnost says, “It’s got a true web version, it has a true mobile version, a true Mac version, and a true Windows version. All of those things talk to each other beautifully through a single data backbone.” AutoCAD today, the modern state-of-the-art app that exists today, took over a decade of effort to get it where it is. Anagnost mentions that making those decisions to provide this incredibly modern version of AutoCAD that works on any device and utilizes the cloud took years of work. “And it did disappoint customers with their wish-lists,” he adds. Does that mean sometimes developers must ignore some wish-list items to do the work to get applications ready for the next era of computing? Yes. Does it mean that Revit has fallen behind on architecture development because it is going through a similar transformation? Not precisely, but perhaps a bit.

 

 

 

 

Anagnost admits that not a lot of functionality [for architects] has come out and predates his administration. “But Revit has not been sitting idle,” he contends. “Developers have been in there in the guts getting ready for structural work, retooling many things.” He reminds me that Revit is a 20-year code base built monolithically on a Windows stack. It wasn’t constructed natively for multi-threading or created for any of the modern ways apps today can move across platforms and devices and talk to the cloud. “It wasn’t built for any of those things,” he says, “so they are going to continue to replumb that in Revit.”

Does this plumbing mean that the work done with AutoCAD that took a decade to complete is underway with Revit? “I want to caution you that everything we have done with AutoCAD we might not do with Revit,” he says. “There may be more of a Fusion-like approach with Revit.”

“I’m not saying that we won’t do some of the things we did with AutoCAD with Revit,” he adds. “It might not be the most efficient way to solve the problems.”

So the big takeaway is this. Both AutoCAD and Fusion form essential guides and templates for how Revit and future Autodesk AEC solutions evolve to tap into both Revit and BIM 360. This represents a complex set of decisions—which parts of Revit’s future needs get addressed by the “thick-client” approach of Fusion versus which elements get addressed by recoding the guts of Revit in the style of modern AutoCAD.

We have a lot more to share with you on that—including the multi-platform nature of modern app development and the possibility of Revit on the Mac—in our follow-up feature. Those who signed the letter ought to know now that Revit is getting more attention to architects’ needs and getting serious under-the-hood recoding to address performance.

Open Letter and Licensing

As for the open letter’s licensing issue, Anagnost says all matters communicated in the open letter will get resolved in the fullness of time. Part of the problem has been the difficulty in transitioning to the subscription models amongst a myriad of other perpetual license types. “We are in a betweener-state,” says Anagnost, “not that I want to have empathy for Autodesk, but there is a catch-twenty two we have where we have to deprecate the old system to get us into the new system. I wish we could do it more quickly and seamlessly, but it’s hard stuff.”

 

 

 

 

In Architosh’s discussions with firms who signed the letter, the multi-user licensing going away was a big concern for them. Large firms, in particular, have dozens of users who touch BIM very lightly. Should they be charged full price for occasional use? “We have a model for pay-for-use but what is going to be different about this new model is you have an active directory where you name everybody,” he says.

Named licenses are here to stay, but Autodesk will have a system where a firm pays for a certain amount of capacity. You debit against that capacity when somebody uses the Revit application. He notes, “It is the same thing when we at Autodesk consume things like SalesForce, for example.”

AEC Futures at Autodesk

The open letter movement marks a critical inflection point in the history of AEC digital tools for architects. The letter came about in the year when it has become abundantly clear that the future of software in AEC will broadly reflect and conform to the overall software industry’s key trends. We are long past the era of desktop apps; we are long past the document file era as the thing that gets passed around to collaborate. We are firmly now in the era of the API.

With the API era before us, the AEC industry is also facing transformational forces in the way we manufacture, construct, and operate all manner of the things humans make. Buildings and cities are the last significant industrial spheres that have not gone through a dramatic digital and workflow transformation, and Anagnost is keenly aware of that.

 

 

 

 

“My big platform when I took over—and frankly it’s what I said to the [Autodesk] board when I was under consideration for the CEO job—is that I think the AEC industry is ready for this kind of revolution that the manufacturing industry already had,” says Anagnost.

“It’s going to be harder in AEC, but it is going to be more impactful,” he adds, “because of the size of the AEC ecosystem, because of the potential productivity gains that can be envisioned. The cloud is going to be very good to AEC, and the things that are associated with it are going to be very good for AEC.”

The Revit Open Letter moment has presented Autodesk with a self-inflicted optics problem—a sort of “Revit-gate” without the notion of impropriety—a kind of crisis of confidence in the world’s most used BIM platform by a strategically organized vocal minority in a market with competent competitors. Anagnost and his team have moved swiftly to stress that they are listening and do care. Just as we were wrapping up this article, the Open Design Alliance and Autodesk announced that Autodesk would be joining the ODA.

MORE: Autodesk Joins ODA to Fast Track Improvements to Interoperability

Given the history between these two organizations, the news is a real surprise. Amy Bunszel of Autodesk shares that while Autodesk had been researching an improved IFC development toolkit and has been in conversation with the ODA for some time about membership, she acknowledges that joining was accelerated by the desire to listen to “the constructive criticism” received by their customers, particularly around better international data exchange standards.

This announcement should provide hopeful optimism throughout the broader AEC industry while also addressing significant near-term pain-points in the workflows of the signatories of the open letter. And with AU 2020 fast approaching, I expect more announcements that will begin to fill in the details of the longer future of Revit and Autodesk’s AEC strategy in general.

Next Page:  Synergy and Alignment — The APIs Democratizing Role

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Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: ARP Stuttgart / Architosh. All rights reserved.)  Non-credited images are copyrighted to Architosh.

Title Credit:  Andrew Anagnost on stage at AU 2019.  (Image:  Autodesk / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

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