Autodesk Acquires France-Based Robobat
Company augments BIM lineup with structural engineering analysis technology.
Sep 7, 2006
By: Sara Ferris
Cadalyst

Autodesk yesterday acquired Robobat, a developer of software for structural engineering analysis, for US$33 million in cash from the Grenoble, France-based company. Autodesk and Robobat had previously partnered to integrate Robobat's ROBOT Millennium application with Autodesk Revit Structure. In addition, Robobat develops steel and concrete detailing software that runs on AutoCAD. More than 10,000 licensed copies of its products are in use worldwide by 8,000 customers. The company reported sales of 11.9 million Euros in 2005.

My initial reaction to this news was that Autodesk felt compelled to acquire a structural analysis developer before Bentley Systems bought them all. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but Bentley did go on a structural spending spree at the end of 2005. It acquired RAM International in December 2005, a month after completing its purchase of the STAAD product line from REI (Research Engineers, Inc.) for $23.5 million. At the time of purchase, the STAAD user base was reported at 19,000. Details on the RAM purchase were not disclosed.

Clearly, both Autodesk and Bentley see structural engineering as a key element of their BIM (building information modeling) offerings, important enough to bring in-house rather than leave to third-party partners.

Jay Bhatt, vice-president of Autodesk Building Solutions, indicates that Autodesk will continue to support other structural analysis products: "As we enhance our comprehensive solutions for structural engineering, Autodesk remains committed to supporting our customer's choice of structural analysis and detailing software. We will continue to support open data-exchange standards and to work closely with our strategic structural engineering partners to support the many different ways that structural engineers around the world use software to work and realize their ideas."

Revit Structure currently supports export of data in DWG, DXF, DGN and IFC formats. In addition, the Revit Structure analytical model dynamically links with external applications such as ETABS from CSI, RISAFloor and RISA-3D as well as ROBOT Millennium. RAM recently made available its interface to Revit Structure 3, though Bentley is not an Autodesk partner.

Autodesk says that it will continue to support Robobat's existing product line as well as offer new solutions for structural engineering, detailing and analysis that incorporate both Robobat and Autodesk technology.

It will be interesting to see how Autodesk positions the Robobat products, which are now more widely used in Europe than in the United States, where Autodesk partner RISA and RAM (a.k.a. Bentley) are strong.

I expect to follow up with Autodesk to inquire about its reasons for the acquisition and plans for the Robobat technology. If there's anything in particular you'd like to find out on this subject, send me questions at editors@cadalyst.com.