Autodesk, Inc. and Siemens have announced an interoperability agreement aimed at helping manufacturers decrease the costs associated with incompatibility among product development software applications and avoid potential data integrity problems.

Through this agreement, Autodesk and Siemens' product lifecycle management (PLM) software business will take steps to significantly improve the interoperability between their companies' respective software offerings. This agreement brings together two computer-aided design (CAD) software leaders with the common goal of streamlining data sharing and reducing costs in organizations with multi-CAD environments.

Today's manufacturers are under increased pressure to get high quality products to market faster, with increased efficiencies and lower costs to the consumer. Many of these companies operate in environments consisting of various solutions from different CAD software vendors.

These multi-CAD environments may exist internally between departments or externally with partners and supply chains. Interoperability among CAD software has therefore emerged as a critical issue for users of design and engineering software, and achieving it is a major challenge for manufacturers.

The interoperability agreement aims to decrease the overall effort and costs that are commonly associated with supporting these environments. In particular, interoperability between the offerings from Siemens and Autodesk will significantly improve the many situations where a combination of their software currently exists.

Under the terms of the agreement, both companies will share toolkit technology and exchange end-user software applications to build and market interoperable products.

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