The OpenDWG Alliance Announces Name Change to Open Design Alliance

The OpenDWG Alliance Announces Name Change to Open Design Alliance. Broader Demand for Additional Data Formats Key to Name Change

PHOENIX,AZ (PRWEB) October 31, 2003 -- The OpenDWG Alliance, a non-profit industry consortium committed to promoting open industry-standard formats for the exchange of CAD data, today announced that it is changing its name to the Open Design Alliance.

The new name reflects the growth in the number and types of file formats the Alliance supports within the program libraries it develops. The Alliance previously only supported DWG and DXF (the file formats which are native to AutoDesks AutoCAD product). In May 2003, the Alliance signed an agreement with Bentley Systems, providing for formal support of the OpenDGN standard. The Alliance also provides support, on a less extensive basis, for DWF (Autodesks Design Web Format), and SVG (The W3C XML-based Simplified Vector Format.)

Our new name reflects our commitment to open design data," said Evan Yares, president of The Open Design Alliance. DWG is still a very popular format, but there are others, such as DGN, that are also extensively used. By thoughtfully expanding the formats we support, we are taking significant steps towards making CAD data interoperability much less of a problem."

The Open Design Alliance plans to selectively expand the types of files it supports in the future. The Alliance was created to leverage the billions of CAD files in the world that are stored in de facto standard formats. The Alliance develops and maintains commercial-quality program libraries that allow software developers and users to read and write these files. Unlike open-source software, the Alliance libraries are developed by a team of professional software developers, and are supported by a dedicated staff. Alliance libraries are licensed on a level-playing field basis.

CAD users and developers have come to count on us to provide baseline tools that solve interoperability problems for them," said Yares. Because we are a non-profit consortium, and we serve the entire engineering software industry, we can focus on problems that might otherwise be hard to address."

About the Open Design Alliance
Founded in 1998, the Open Design Alliance is a non-profit consortium committed to promoting open industry-standards for the exchange of CAD data. Its members include thousands of the largest and the smallest companies in the world. The Open Design Alliance is a leading light in interoperability issues for the engineering software industry and its users.

For additional information about the Open Design Alliance, please visit www.opendesign.com

Open Design Alliance, OpenDWG, and OpenDGN are trademarks of Open Design Alliance. All products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Open Design Alliance Contact:
Evan Yares
President
(602) 263-7666
evan@opendesign.com   

Press Contact:
Ken Feitz
Strategic Reach
(303) 487-7406
ken@strategicreachpr.com

ENDS