SAN RAFAEL, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 2003-- OGC Members Autodesk, Intergraph, MapInfo and Laser-Scan Team Up to Increase Interoperability with Oracle(R) Spatial

Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq:ADSK), the world's leading design software and digital content company, today announced a joint initiative with Intergraph, MapInfo and Laser-Scan to facilitate and promote enterprise interoperability. This team will enable their respective off-the-shelf products to interoperate more seamlessly via Oracle(R) Spatial, the leading open enterprise database. Each of the four vendors will deliver an Interoperability Kit that will simplify data access and data sharing from and to the applications, reducing deployment time and enforcing open standards across departments.

Today, using Oracle Database and the products from Autodesk, Intergraph, Laser-Scan, and MapInfo, each department can now use their preferred tools and, at the same time, work from a shared enterprise database. And, as part of the team's continuing commitment to the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) vision and mission, the results of this effort that address new feature representations for annotation and oriented points will be matured and submitted to the standards setting programs of the Open GIS Consortium for additional community input.

For a White Paper on geographic information systems (GIS) interoperability via Oracle Spatial, and information on the Interoperability Kit, visit www.autodesk.com/isd.

"We are excited to see Autodesk and this group of OGC members engaged in this unified approach to interoperability processes using Oracle," said Steve Hagan, vice president, Server Technologies at Oracle. "Oracle Spatial is used around the globe in thousands of enterprise and national GIS, and digital mapping applications that are shared by and accessed through every major spatial and GIS partner technology. We believe this initiative is an important milestone in the continuing evolution of open standards and will support continued development of this initiative within the OGC consensus process."

David Schell, president of OGC, said, "I applaud the efforts of this group of OGC members. They have learned to work together in the spirit of cooperative development, which is the essence of the standards process. Such collaborative activities build the market and hold the potential for introducing valuable new specifications into the consortium's consensus process. We encourage the group to continue its collaborative efforts through a formal working group of the consortium's and look forward to their developing the broad member participation needed to create a useful standard."

"As a founding and principal member of the Open GIS Consortium, Autodesk is actively involved in the development of standards and committed to their implementation," said Chris Bradshaw, vice president of the Infrastructure Solutions Division at Autodesk. "We are excited to contribute to this initiative around an open database technology such as Oracle Database. This is direct answer to our customers asking for a higher level of interoperability in our products."

About Autodesk

Autodesk is the world's leading design software and digital content company, offering customers progressive business solutions through powerful technology products and services. Autodesk helps customers in the building, manufacturing, infrastructure, digital media, and wireless data services fields increase the value of their digital design data and improve efficiencies across their entire project lifecycle management processes.

* Occasionally, Autodesk makes statements regarding planned or future development efforts for our existing or new products and services. These statements are not intended to be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services, or features but merely reflect our current plans, which may change. The Company assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in circumstances, after the statements are made.

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    CONTACT: Autodesk
             Elizabeth Aune, 415-507-8195
             elizabeth.aune@autodesk.com

    SOURCE: Autodesk