Autodesk utility design and substation products spun off to SBS

3 October 2016 Geoff Zeiss

It has just been announced that Autodesk and Spatial Business Systems (SBS) have formed a strategic alliance.   SBS will be responsible for future development, support, and licensing of Autodesk® Substation Design for Inventor®, Autodesk® Substation Design for Electrical, and AutoCAD ® Utility Design (AUD) software.   SBS will focus on the ongoing development and support of Substation Design and AUD, while Autodesk will continue to focus on the underlying platform technologies. This is intended to enable SBS to employ innovative, customer-focused development processes to support the new product enhancements necessary to address the evolving needs of the utility industry. The new products offered by SBS will be renamed to reflect the new structure.

The Autodesk team responsible for product development, system deployment and support will join SBS and work to incorporate new enhancements that will more closely integrate with the SBS Utility DataHub™ suite of utility integration products.

This sounds like very good news for Autodesk utility customers.  I have known Dennis Beck, President of SBS, for years.  He and his team know the utility business intimately having developed spatially-enabled utility solutions integrating Smallworld, Autodesk, Oracle and other products for a wide range of utility customers.

Geoff Zeiss

Geoff Zeiss

Geoff Zeiss has more than 20 years experience in the geospatial software industry and 15 years experience developing enterprise geospatial solutions for the utilities, communications, and public works industries. His particular interests include the convergence of BIM, CAD, geospatial, and 3D. In recognition of his efforts to evangelize geospatial in vertical industries such as utilities and construction, Geoff received the Geospatial Ambassador Award at Geospatial World Forum 2014. Currently Geoff is Principal at Between the Poles, a thought leadership consulting firm. From 2001 to 2012 Geoff was Director of Utility Industry Program at Autodesk Inc, where he was responsible for thought leadership for the utility industry program. From 1999 to 2001 he was Director of Enterprise Software Development at Autodesk. He received one of ten annual global technology awards in 2004 from Oracle Corporation for technical innovation and leadership in the use of Oracle. Prior to Autodesk Geoff was Director of Product Development at VISION* Solutions. VISION* Solutions is credited with pioneering relational spatial data management, CAD/GIS integration, and long transactions (data versioning) in the utility, communications, and public works industries. Geoff is a frequent speaker at geospatial and utility events around the world including Geospatial World Forum, Where 2.0, MundoGeo Connect (Brazil), Middle East Spatial Geospatial Forum, India Geospatial Forum, Location Intelligence, Asia Geospatial Forum, and GITA events in US, Japan and Australia. Geoff received Speaker Excellence Awards at GITA 2007-2009.

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