Autodesk Acquires Vela Systems, Aims To Bring Construction Management Systems To Tablets

Autodesk took to the wires this morning to announce its acquisition of a long-standing partner, Vela Systems, which is described in the announcement as “a provider of cloud and mobile field management software for the construction industry.” It’s Autodesk’s hope that this move will better equip the company, and the whole construction industry for that matter, to better utilize cloud storage and mobile products. Terms of the transaction were not revealed.

Vela Systems’ products will eventually join Autodesk’s growing collection of mobile products that focus on content creation. This builds upon Autodesk’s current Building Information Modeling products.

“BIM has tremendous value in the planning and design aspects of construction projects, but if you can’t get that rich data into the field, at the point of construction, you are leaving out the critical ‘last 100 yards’ in the process. Integrating Vela Systems and its cloud and mobile products with the Autodesk BIM portfolio transforms the business of construction, delivering valuable information to job sites anywhere in the world,” said Amar Hanspal, an Autodesk Senior Vice President, Information Modeling and Platform Products Group, said in a released statement this morning.

Autodesk promises that the Vela Systems addition will streamline multiple aspects of the construction process. This will reportedly be done through increasing the virtual building’s quality and fidelity, hopefully improving the overall design. By moving a lot of a construction project’s nonsense — such as inventory management, document tracking, and construction plans — to the tablet (and also the cloud), this could result in big things for everyone involved from the original architect to the eventual occupant.