Despite
the challenging economy, Autodesk is growing its GIS division by
acquisition. On Tuesday Autodesk announced that it was buying
Florida-based CAiCE Software Corporation, a developer of
surveying and engineering applications for transportation
agencies and consultants. The deal is valued at approximately
$10 million cash. The announcement stated that the company did
not expect the purchase to significantly change earnings for the
year. Autodesk intends to start the GIS Solutions Division's
Transportation Group from the CAiCE staff, which will remain at
its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
CAiCE, whose name is derived from "Computer Aided Civil
Engineering and Surveying," is not well known in GIS circles,
save those involved in transportation. If I recall correctly, I
ran into the company for the first time in 1992 at the Highway
Engineers Exchange Program (HEEP) in Burlington, VT. The company
was founded in 1989, so it was still fairly young at the time.
Third parties in Autodesk's booth, including Softdesk (now part
of Autodesk) were showing off engineering tools for highway
design. Things have changed significantly since then.
CAiCE's products work with both Autodesk and Bentley CAD
products. CAiCE joined the Autodesk Developer Network a few
years ago and made its products compatible with Autodesk Land
Desktop, Autodesk Civil Design, Autodesk Map, Autodesk Civil
Series, and Autodesk Map Series. CAiCE is also a member of the
Microsoft Developer Network, Bentley Enterprise Developer
Program, and a Visio and ESRI Business Partner. The company is
also involved with Leica, AASHTO and LandXML.org. Expect the
relationships with Bentley and ESRI to change as CAiCE becomes
part of Autodesk.
Autodesk maintains that there is little overlap in the two
companies' product lines. Autodesk plans to use the CAiCE
technology to add transportation-related functionality to its
product line. CAiCE's products include Visual Survey, Visual
Roads, Visual Construction, Visual Drainage, Visual Hydro,
Visual Bridge, and Visual Landscape.
What will Autodesk gain from the acquisition? My guess is the
big ticket, steady investment of Departments of Transportation (DOTs).
The DOTs bring not only their many seats, but also another key
set of customers-their consultants-to the Autodesk family. CAiCE
currently lists several state and Canadian provincial
transportation organizations, as well as many of the top civil
engineering firms as customers.
Autodesk's GIS acquisitions to date have included what I
consider core technology. Landmark, which became Autodesk Map
was a CAD-based GIS. REGIS, which became the now defunct
Autodesk World, was a desktop GIS. Argus, which became MapGuide,
was an Internet mapping solution. Vision, which became GIS
Design Server, was a back-end solution. Now, for the first time,
the Autodesk GIS group is buying application software. I suppose
you could argue that buying Softdesk was an application
purchase, but that was before the GIS group was very active
(1996).
I believe Autodesk has made a good choice. Instead of
acquiring assets to tackle the biggest GIS
market-government-Autodesk has chosen to tighten its grip on the
engineering side of GIS. Said another way, Autodesk is choosing
to battle Bentley and not ESRI.
Since the release of its first GIS product, Autodesk Map, the
company has used the strategy of parlaying its strength in
engineering and design to move its technology from engineering
departments into GIS-using departments, such as planning. That's
still the plan, according to GIS Vice President Larry Diamond.
He explained that customers are "increasingly looking for a
single vendor to bridge the gap between the planners using GIS
software and the engineers using design software." Out of
context that might sound like a statement from Bentley about
geoengineering.
Bentley still does have a significant share of DOT clients.
The GEOPAK website (GEOPAK merged with Bentley in late 2001)
currently notes 19 DOTs. And Bentley inherited InRoads users
when it acquired the civil product line from Intergraph in early
2001. This past May, Bentley received a statewide contract from
the Virginia Department of Transportation. VDOT was in fact
phasing out CAiCE and other software in favor of GEOPAK.
What is the impact on GIS? It's hard to say if there will be
any, really. Engineering such as roadway design isn't really
done using GIS software. The planning aspect, before design and
construction might use GIS. And the long-term maintenance after
construction might use GIS. But the actual engineering is
performed using other software.
Autodesk has been touting the use of data through the
lifecycle of a project. In transportation, that would mean
moving data from planning, through design and construction, and
on to maintenance. So, the big change here is that Autodesk now
owns "more" of the potential lifecycle.
Autodesk, I'd argue, has some of the parts of the
transportation lifecycle, but by no means all of them. One big
hole: dynamic segmentation, the ability to "chop up" a linear
feature into segments using measurement data in a database, not
physical breaks in the linework. Perhaps that acquisition is
next?
