It was announced on Tuesday, that Trimble and Nemetschek Group have “formed a strategic alliance to expand the deployment of Building Information Modeling (BIM) across the entire Design-Build-Operate (DBO) lifecycle of buildings.”

One of their goals is to “support new solutions and promote workflow interoperability between selected products.”

Trimble SketchUp is one of the most ubiquitous design tools available. With the launch of MEPdesigner and IFC exporting this past November, SketchUp has been obviously moving towards BIM. And since Trimble also owns Tekla BIMsight (a construction collaboration software), this move makes sense.

On the other hand, Nemetschek owns ArchiCAD and Vectorworks, both of which are substantial (if somewhat smaller) players in the BIM market. Of the two, ArchiCAD seems to be more widely used among architects, though Vectorworks Landmark is currently one of the only BIM options that specifically caters to landscape architects.

It will be interesting to see the results of this partnership. With a giant like SketchUp involved, it could very easily have a substantial impact on current BIM workflows and standards.

You can read the full press release here.