I had a real flashback from the past when I received an email from Autodesk, inviting me to join in on a webcast to be presented by an old colleague and ex-pat Brit, Pete Southwood on MapGuide Enterprise. Despite a financially poor period a result of a downturn in the core AEC market ?, Autodesk is once again making a impact in the GIS market.
Autodesks support of OSGeo and the release of the Open Source version of MapGuide have got people talking about Autodesk again, and clearly Map 3D 2007 remains a strong data capture tool, but… and its a big but, the issue of CAD / GIS integration still remains a problem for many organisations and customers of Autodesk.
I would argue that most geospatial data actually resides today as design data held in DWG and DGN files not in GIS file formats let alone geospatial databases.
So there remains an opportunity for Autodesk to finally begin to migrate this data using their tools – perhaps the innovation which results from the open source development around MapGuide may provide some clues to opening up this difficult to crack market.
When I was involved with MapGuide at Autodesk, I often argued with anyone who would listen, that MapGuide had the makings of a excellent server of geospatial drawing data for AutoCAD Map clients – at the time there was never the engineering resource available to do it, of course today, there is a whole community of skilled developers looking for the challenge.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.