Autodesk has acquired InteliSOLVE.

Exciting news for those of us who have been waiting for Autodesk to incorporate Hydrology and Hydraulics into Civil3D. Now we can, sit back and wait some more.

While the acquisition is good news for Civil3D users, it will take some time for InteliSOLVE’s products to be integrated into Civil3D. Most industry experts are expecting their products to be included “in the box” with the C3D 2009 release this coming April. I wouldn’t expect anything beyond importing/exporting data between the products. Hopefully they will have time to tighten up the interaction between to two products before the April release.

I was disappointed that Autodesk didn’t acquire Haestad Methods. Haestad is the most respected H&H software on the market. While the InteliSOLVE acquisition is good news for C3D users I was hoping Autodesk would have pursued a different direction by bulding on the Land Desktop H&H tools.

In my opinion the H&H tools in Land Desktop have the best user interface on the market. They are easy to use, intuitive for engineers, and they run inside of Autocad. The user interface for pipeworks far surpasses StormCAD’s. The report features could use some improvment and overall updating. I wish Autodesk would have taken a look at what they had in house and put the acquisition war chest toward internal development of H&H.

It will be interesting to see how far Autodesk takes the intelisolve products. Will they build the software into C3D or will it only run stand alone? Will it be dynamically linked? Will they evolve the two products to include basin, culvert, open channel and weir C3D objects? Meanwhile all we can do is wait.