Welcome to AECWeekly! Happy New Year! This issue will feature some of the top topics, announcements and trends AECWeekly touched upon over the past year.
AECWeekly is a news magazine featuring important industry news profiles, a summary of recently published AEC product and company news, customer wins, and coming events. Brought to you by AECCafe.
AECWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Top News of the Week, Acquisitions/Agreements/Alliances, Announcements, New Products, Around the Web and Upcoming Events.
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Susan Smith, Managing Editor
Industry News
Top Ten AEC Topics and Trends of 2007
by Susan Smith
The following AEC topics, trends and announcements made our 2007 Top Ten list, many of them chosen by our readers.
1) The growth of building information modeling (BIM). As a result of that growth, other trends are emerging (according to Autodesk): a) the growth of analysis, b) contractors driving model-based processes, c) MEP users driving BIM adoption, d) the proliferation of third party BIM products.
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Autodesk customers are now building a lot more models, and analysis is becoming a very important component. Autodesk’s purchase of Robobat speaks to this trend, and you’ll hear more discussion of Inventor, Autodesk’s 3D mechanical modeling software, being pushed as an important tool for engineers and contractors.
Phil Bernstein, vice president Industry Strategy and Relations, for AEC Solutions, attests to the fact that contractors are using Revit more. “If they don’t get it from designers, they model it themselves or outsource,” Bernstein explained. “We bought NavisWorks and the most enthusiastic endorsers are contractors. They are looking at fundamental problems. They want to conceptualize in 3D so they can see what 2D drawings mean, making stuff not bump into other things and qualify. Contractors are driving model based processes. They won’t do projects unless they model them first. Counting things and measuring things is a key business problem for people who construct buildings.”
Beau Turner, solutions consulting manager of Building Solutions for Avatech Solutions, an Autodesk reseller and solutions provider, said that the Revit platform with the MEP tool on top of it, has grown the services side of their business to 75% of their total business.
Third party BIM products are also on the rise. Turner noted that “the complete solution isn’t just the one product right now.” Many third party products such as Green Building Studio allow them to take intelligent building models and get downside returns, to see how well a building will perform. In other countries, automated code checking, brought about by third parties, is required, and now in the U.S. GSA projects are requiring it.”
In October, 640 users responded to a blind survey of BIM users conducted by Dr. Lachmi Khemlani working with Bentley Systems as an independent expert. The results of the survey showed that 58 percent of respondents preferred the approach and features of Bentley BIM solutions while 38 percent of all respondents prefer AutoCAD Revit and of the remainder, “strongly preferred” responses, 69 percent chose Bentley BIM solutions and 31 percent chose Revit. The same survey has been placed online so that other BIM users can take the survey themselves and compare their thoughts to what others have concluded.
Of the 640 respondents, Autodesk respondents were 67% and Bentley were 15%.
2) Deltek Announced Pricing of IPO
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“it was a point in time for us to do this. Because of the growth in the company, this will help us look at future acquisitions. We've done five acquisitions in the past two years, so this enables to continue doing that, as well as paying down some debt.
It helps our investment firm, New Mountain Capital, recoup their investment in the company. The product lines will remain the same, it's business as usual.
The prospectus indicates we will use all $42.6M in net proceeds to pay down debt. The vast majority of the debt was incurred during the recapitalization transaction in April of 2005 when New Mountain Capital purchased about 75% of Deltek.
For the metro DC area, it's one of the biggest software IPOs that has happened in recent times, as a result of our growth and our success over the years. We're very specialized in our market and no one does what we do.”
3) Meridian Offers Role Based Interfaces
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Customers have come to Meridian Systems with three top needs:
1. They need to differentiate themselves from their peers. Technology has become a need-to-have rather than a luxury item. Prolog continues to be successful in small to medium sized companies.
Proliance is targeted to the enterprise market. Their priorities are improving their project cost control. Best practices have been implemented and many companies are standardizing on one technology so the entire organization can apply their business processes.
2. Improving visibility across their business using business analytics and business intelligence functionality. With project data in a centralized data, the company is in a position to look at performance across a whole company.
3. Customers are interested in how they will be successful with their implementation. The Starter Pack that Meridian released this summer is a series of technical components bundled together to help accelerate implementations for customers. Sue Watkins, director of marketing for Meridian said the Starter Pack was created in response to helping the construction project management business get a head start, using their experience in that field.
A new technology trend Meridian sees is called composite or role based applications, a development strategy being endorsed by Microsoft, designed to help customers be more successful with their implementations. “Getting your end users to adopt is part of that success,” said Watkins. “The composite application strategy enables companies like Meridian to roll out role based interfaces for different types of users.”
4) Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition Released
The commercial availability of Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition, a project information management software for the AEC market, was announced.
The product is used for mechanical design firms, civil design firms as well as design build and A/E firms.
There are three key areas where Newforma delivers additional benefit in the Fourth Edition:
- Email management. It has the ability to automate and streamline the management of their email.
- Project knowledge and the ability to harvest the wealth of project information in archived projects and other projects, even in your own projects.
- Supporting the BIM process. There are three key areas where Newforma supports BIM:
Coordination, review and markup. “We provided a powerful environment for marking up, reviewing and sharing those views and discussions among fellow project team members.”
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Newforma Project Center software provides workflow to streamline the markup and review of three-dimensional models. The Snapshot tool creates screen captures which Newforma Viewer displays for markup and sharing. Anybody on the project team can easily browse, preview and comment upon the markups. The process provides an audit trail of decisions for a design or submittal review. |
Compare. As you’re moving from milestone to milestone in a BIM environment, you have the ability to compare the upcoming milestone with the previous milestone to catch any unintended changes and to insure that any changes that were intended were properly documented.
5) Rhino 4 Released
In May McNeel & Associates held an international gathering about the future of architecture at the Delft Technical University Faculty of Architecture in Delft, the Netherlands.
Founder Bob McNeel said that many architects have been using their Rhino 3D modeling software to create sculptural buildings with complex forms. In fact, back when they shipped the first product, the first person who called in with an order was somebody in Frank Gehry’s office with Frank’s credit card number.
“I think we noticed it (architecture) on the radar about a two-three years ago, as so many architects starting using it,” said McNeel. “We had some special cases, like the guys who do the geometry work on the Sagrada Familia, for example. They were one of the very early adopters. We’ve been working with them for ten years or so.”
However, it was at around that time that larger architecture firms began to ask McNeel to help with various challenges on projects. Scott Davidson, marketing manager added that “once the build out became popular and famous, we’re finding a lot more clients willing to pay for these types of buildings.”
Coming from the manufacturing and engineering perspective, Rhino naturally leans toward manufacturing in that it creates, analyzes, translates NURBs curves, surfaces and solids in Windows of any complexity or size. Most architectural products come from the 2D drawing and rendering perspective, according to McNeel. Traditionally 2D software vendors offering 3D architectural modeling software grapple with the issue of “moving” architects to 3D. Architects still have the issue of getting accustomed to modeling in 3D with Rhino, however, the information they gather in the modeling process can be used by the fabricator and others throughout the building process.
6) Bentley Applied Research Group
The Applied Research Group at Bentley takes research to the next level. According to Buddy Cleveland, research has been very much product focused, which makes it subject to product delivery deadlines and schedules, and thus within a short time horizon. Without an exclusive focus, said Cleveland, it’s nearly impossible for the company to distinguish research from product development, difficult to gauge the magnitude of our research investments on the one hand, much less the return on these investments on the other.
The Applied Research Group, from a business point of view, is intended to help Bentley increase the visibility of its investments to make sure they are aligned with their business objectives and the customers’ business objectives.
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| A project around the concept of Digital Pen & Paper, licensed from Anoto |
Bentley’s mission is to look “beyond the next release of software, and to identify white space in solutions, determine where we can bring new technologies to you, in support of improving the world’s infrastructure.”
The mission will be executed on one project at a time, some will involve internally prototyped development, others will be joint projects with other organizations, technology providers or partners.
Examples of types of Applied Research projects include GenerativeComponents (GC,) “an associative design system,” the incorporation of technology into existing Bentley products such as Digital Pen & Paper, licensed from Anoto. This technology incorporates a special pen that accurately captures and stores marks made by that pen, and does it by way of special optics in the pen that can record where that pen is based on a microdot pattern embedded into the paper.
7) Informatix Piranesi 5 Released
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Marco Crawford is an architectural technician and long term, established user of Piranesi and MicroGDS, CAD system developed by Informatix. The CAD system is the prime system within the practice he consults for and is used as a full blown CAD environment, but it is also an extremely good modeler and renderer and can export directly to Piranesi in all the file formats. MicroGDS is used to create the models for export to Piranesi.
“For many years I have combined being a perspective artist with a career in architecture. One of the main faults I found with the virtual reality images created by most modeling and rendering packages, was that the resulting images lost the feel of the design being a concept and still evolving,” said Crawford. “Piranesi allowed me to return to the sketch and loose feel required in the early stages of the design, but gave me the speed of productivity which I was not able to achieve when creating these images using traditional mediums such as air brush, marker pens etc.”
According to Crawford, the biggest change for existing Piranesi users is the completely re-designed interface. “The new features that I consider important are as follows: the ability to record a style as it is being applied, multiple cut-outs, the style selector, new brush selection options, the new lighting tools and even to an experienced user the new "Help Assistant" is extremely handy.”
8) Nemetschek’s Acquisition of Graphisoft Shares
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“At the moment, we believe there are four important CAD platforms on the AEC market. Three of these come from Nemetschek - Allplan, Archicad and Vectorworks,” said Franke. “All the systems have their own place on the market and depending on customer requirements, complement each other to provide a unique offering.”
According to Franke, Nemetschek has been on a clear growth course again since 2006.
“1. With Graphisoft, we will be able to strengthen our market position, particularly in the architecture sector. We are the number one in Europe for AEC software solutions and believe we also have good opportunities for growth outside Europe. Nemetschek now has a customer base of 270,000 active customers all over the world.
2. With the acquisition, the group can greatly improve its business KPIs through a significant growth in sales, a considerable increase in the EBITDA operating profit and an increase in operating cash flow. As of 2007, Nemetschek, will have sales of more than 140 million euros and its target sales figure of 150 million euros is clearly in view.
3. Together with Graphisoft, Nemetschek will henceforth be offering the powerful product and service range for all customer requirements in the area of real estate planning. The two companies are already among the top providers worldwide in the AEC sector. Globalization activities are in full swing. Over the medium and long term, both companies see better perspectives for their future development.
“The market is becoming increasingly global, which means a lot of additional efforts and expenditure to get a foothold in new markets, and this can be achieved more effectively by the common strategy of both companies.”
“After [market leader Autodesk] Graphisoft was always our next biggest competitor in the U.S where it has a very good market reputation. Graphisoft’s revenues from the U.S are in the range of �3-�4 million while Nemetschek’s U.S subsidiary posts �18 million.”
9) National BIM Standard Version 1
National BIM Standard, Version 1 Overview, Principles and Methodologies, was released in June.
According to the press release, the NBIMS has six goals: 1) Seek industry wide agreement, 2) Develop an open and shared standard, 3) Facilitate discovery and requirements for sharing information throughout the facility lifecycle, 4) Develop and distribute knowledge that helps share information that is machine readable, 5) Define a minimum BIM, and 6) Provide for information assurance for BIM throughout the facility lifecycle. As an initiative under the buildingSMART® Alliance, it is garnering support form the widest spectrum of associations, agencies, organizations, vendors, and individual practitioners ever assembled. This document is the first to be issued under the new NIBS buildingSMART® Alliance initiative announced February 27, 2007.
10) Autodesk P&ID Announced at daratechPLANT 2007
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Top News of the Week
From January 2008 onwards Nemetschek’s new software version Allplan BIM 2008 will be available in 14 further languages. In October Nemetschek released Allplan BIM 2008 Architecture and Engineering in German and English. The new versions also consider country-specific standards for construction. Allplan BIM 2008 supports the process of Building Information Modeling (BIM). Architects and engineers are free to decide which working method they want to use, without having to switch between different applications. A simple virtual building model increases value for users, while improved interoperability shortens coordination and approval processes.
Announcements
Avatech Solutions, Inc., the nationwide technology experts for design, engineering, and facilities management, announced that Barton Malow, has engaged Avatech to perform complete implementation services for the Autodesk Revit family to assist the firm with the design and construction of a Michigan state highway transportation facility. Barton Malow Company provides construction management, design/build, program management, general contracting, technology and rigging services nationwide. The firm's annual revenues exceed $1 billion and large projects including the National Aquarium in Baltimore and the Detroit Airport north terminal renovation.
Research and Markets has announced the addition of "Understanding Adoption of Enterprise Applications (Customer Focus)" to their offering.
The annual Technology Trends survey indicates that enterprise applications remain the principal area of IT investment. In this brief the results from the 2007 Technology Trends survey, covering 1,000 IT decision makers in the US, Australia and the EU, are discussed with respect to enterprise application penetration, vendor mindshare, investment opportunities and deployment preferences.
TenLinks, Inc. announced the acquisition of CADtalent.com, the top rated CAD job posting website.
New Products
QuickARC announced the launch of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry's first web-based system to provide instant online quotes for the construction of architectural scale models using 3D Printing technology.
The IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC) announces the release of IntelliCAD 7.0 Alpha to the ITC members.
IntelliCAD 7.0 is a complete re-architecture of the IntelliCAD technology. IntelliCAD 7.0 integrates DWGdirect from the Open Design Alliance directly as its internal database, which provides improved performance in loading and saving files, full access to the DWGdirect DRX development interface (an object-oriented C++ API), and a flexible new graphics subsystem.
When completed, IntelliCAD 7.0 will further enhance the ability of ITC members to create advanced and highly specialized vertical applications and deliver robust CAD technology to their end-users.
Paradigm Imaging Group, a supplier of large-format scanning, printing and document archiving solutions, introduced a new addition to their product line CAD|STATION Software.
CAD|STATION software, a product of RATIO America, provides a powerful enhancement to Paradigm’s extensive line of MFP systems (EIS Supra, Quatra, Ultima and Flex) and large-format scanners. CAD|STATION provides the ability to drive up to three Canon printers simultaneously, enabling the production of 5 - D size color prints per minute!
Cadsoft Corporation, developer of BIM design software for the professional residential design market, is proud to announce the release of Envisioneer 4.5.
This much anticipated version will be a free upgrade for clients with version 4.0. It introduces an entirely new set of features that are based on actual requests from Envisioneer’s rapidly growing client base.
Nemetschek North America announced the release of its Service Pack 2 for the VectorWorks 2008 line of software, which includes VectorWorks Designer, VectorWorks Architect, VectorWorks Landmark, VectorWorks Spotlight, VectorWorks Machine Design, VectorWorks Fundamentals, and RenderWorks.
Around the Web
CAD Software is the New Black, by Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com December 7, 2007 -- Since the 1990s, fashion companies, including those that make delicates, have been employing the kinds of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing, or CAD/CAM, software previously reserved for architects, designers, and engineers.
U.S. green-tech hot spots go coast to coast, by Martin LaMonica, December 13, 2007, CNET News.com --Over the last three years, an avalanche of venture capital has flowed into start-ups developing technology to use natural resources more efficiently. Incumbent fuel producers and energy utilities are also investing in alternative fuels and power sources.
Autodesk Executive Chairman Carol Bartz Exercises Options for 200,000 Shares, AP, Yahoo Finance, December 12, 2007
Events
| ATLANTA BUILD, REMODEL AND LANDSCAPE EXPO 2008 | |
| Date: | January 4 - 6, 2008 |
| Place: | Atlanta Exposition Center
Atlanta, GA USA |
| The 9th annual Build, Remodel and Landscape Expo is held at the Atlanta Exposition Center, an ideal location just off HWY 285, making it easily accessible to the Atlanta metro area. This consumer home show offers the latest and best products and services to home owners wishing to remodel the home where they presently live or to build a new home. With plenty of convenient parking at the Atlanta Exposition Center, a facility with a proven track record of hosting quality, well attended events, you are sure to meet experts in all areas of the home improvement industry. | |
| Using the IES Plug-in within Revit Architecture | |
| Date: | January 11, 2008 |
| Place: | Radisson Plaza- Warwick Hotel
1701 Locust St, Philadelphia, PA USA |
| The included IES plug-in within Revit Architecture provides a direct link to IES software. This will enable you to perform easy, top-level analysis of energy efficiency and building performance at early stages of the design process. Simple to use architect oriented toolkits facilitate sustainable design with the click of a few buttons.
Without the need for any specialist simulation knowledge or the need to re-input geometry data, and without leaving the Revit environment, you are able to quickly import the Revit Architecture BIM model into IES’s unique system of integrated building performance analysis tools. Within Revit Architecture, the Toolkits provide four analysis options:
The Toolkits automatically run the chosen analysis through the IES suite of building performance software and generate an html report of relevant information quickly and easily. Analysis of a building’s performance at the early concept stages of the design process allows architects to make informed decisions about orientation, layout, form and construction. Furthermore, generating such high quality building performance information at the early stage of the design process makes it easier to design sustainable, low-energy buildings. | |
| BUILD THE GOVERNMENT | |
| Date: | January 16 - 17, 2008 |
| Place: | The Federal Sales Academy
Bethesda, MD USA |
| Fedmarket has developed an intensive, two-day workshop targeted at executives in the construction, facilities maintenance and interior design industries. The workshop is limited to 30 people who are interested in winning federal construction and maintenance contracts in 2008. | |
| World of concrete 2008 | |
| Date: | January 22 - 25, 2008 |
| Place: | Las Vegas Convention Center
Las Vegas, NV USA |
| With more than 900,000 net sq. ft. of exhibits occupied by 1,739 exhibitors, and professional registrants of 91,628, World of Concrete 2007 was the largest show in its 33-year history! This year, WOC 2008 promises to bring you an even bigger and better show with all of the production equipment, handling tools, trucks, the latest technologies, 90-minute and three-hour seminar programs, indoor and outdoor events & demonstrations, resources and valuable information for the concrete and masonry industry professionals. | |
| Streamlining Your Proposal Phase | |
| Date: | January 22, 2008 |
| Place: | King of Prussia Center
630 Freedom Business Center, 3rd Floor, King of Prussia, PA USA |
In this exclusive event, Synergis Director of Infrastructure & GIS Solutions, Bill Frederick will be discussing the use of Google Earth satellite imagery within the AutoCAD Civil 3D environment. Gain an understanding of the following and experience how Google Earth tools are invaluable to your 3D design models:
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| Underground Construction Technology (UCT) | |
| Date: | January 29 - 31, 2008 |
| Place: | Atlanta, GA USA |
| Welcome to the 14th Annual Underground Construction Technology (UCT) International Conference & Exhibition! UCT 2008 is your passport to the only event focused on the underground utility construction and rehabilitation markets. UCT is entirely dedicated to providing the industry with a forum for dialogue and education concerning all things underground – both trenchless and traditional methods. | |
| BALTIMORE HOME BUILDING AND REMODELING SHOW 2008 | |
| Date: | February 1 - 3, 2008 |
| Place: | Baltimore Convention Center
MD USA |
| The 10th annual Home Building and Remodeling Show is a consumer home show held at the beautiful Baltimore Convention Center located in the heart of the inner harbor of Baltimore, Maryland. | |