By Amy Bunszel, Autodesk Vice President, AutoCAD Products. 

Earlier today Autodesk announced that we reached a settlement in a lawsuit we filed last year against ZWSoft.  While this case was pending we were unable to comment, but now that we’ve reached a settlement, I’d like to share a bit more detail about how our ongoing investment in AutoCAD helped us discover and resolve this situation.

Throughout the history of Autodesk, we have continued to invest heavily in the AutoCAD platform, the foundation of our most widely used products.  We continue to enhance AutoCAD’s performance, connectedness, capability and user experience for the millions of AutoCAD customers worldwide.

AutoCAD’s user experience and functionality leads the industry, with some of our competitors replicating not only the file format and functionality, but even the commands and interaction paradigms.  To stay abreast of the latest trends in the industry, we frequently conduct competitive benchmarks between AutoCAD and all similar products. When doing this evaluation with ZWCAD+, we noticed an incredible degree of similarity in the products and felt compelled to act.

Autodesk appreciates competition in the marketplace because it provides added inspiration to do our best for our customers and not rest on our laurels.  When a competitor engages in direct copying, however, we will take action. We are pleased to have reached a settlement with ZWSoft that secures our intellectual property and allows us to move forward and continue to innovate.

I want you to know that the AutoCAD team remains focused on delivering new value to the AutoCAD community.  As we look towards new releases, we will continue to advance the state of the art of usability while maintaining 100% compatibility with the vast network of 3^rd party applications and Trusted DWG files. We are also engaging with users to make sure we are making it as easy as possible for you to access the value we deliver with each release. With our new subscription offerings we are exploring new methods to incrementally deliver capability that is easy to adopt and to streamline moving between versions.  The AutoCAD team will be at AU in full force and are looking forward to engaging with many of you there and as always are happy to get your feedback in any forum.