Yesterday GraphicSpeak ran an article detailing all the may acquisitions Autodesk has been involved in this year. Ranging from engineering products to web collaboration systems, they’ve maintained their place in the headlines through constantly buying up more companies.
In a recent meeting with the press Autodesk CEO Carl Bass confessed that during the last twelve months, Autodesk has been even more enthusiastically acquisitive than usual and promised the company would slow down for a while. But, he said, Autodesk is not going to stop acquiring companies because it is an important part of their strategy for growth.
Then today, as if to prove their point, they announced their acquisition of T-Splines, a popular modeling plugin used by Rhino and SolidWorks. Not only this is an interesting move to acquire a huge tool used by their competition, it’s an interesting addition to the Autodesk portfolio.
This tech is particularly interesting in that in has applications for the entire line of Autodesk products, from Alias and Maya to Inventor and Revit. Where Inventor Fusion eases the process for those moving from AutoCAD to Inventor and history-driven modeling to history-free direct modeling, T-Splines technology adds the ease of creating and transitioning to creating complex manufacturable geometry.
Wonder if Autodesk will make a smooth integrate of T-Splines into the very particular (loved and hated) Alias interface?