The source shared this news with one of our fellow associate editors at approximately the same time as AIA National about a year ago. My fellow editor said, “this might be really big!” Clearly he was excited.

Crowded BIM Market?

One thing that came to my mind immediately was, does the market have room for yet another BIM tool? That’s what I was wondering a year ago.

And I’m still wondering… but here we are and even SolidWorks has entered the world of AEC 3D tools. Perhaps there is more room than we imagine? But I understand that it may not be a whole new competing BIM tool in the classic sense but a tool that operates in the BIM space, complimenting other BIM tools. And that would be consistent with the structure of the BIM transformation in general.

Here We Go

So we are trying our best to secure an arrangement to learn more about this new BIM software offering that is lurking in the software labs somewhere. So here is what we currently know.

Will the new mysterious software be in the BIM space? Yes. Will the new software tool be web-based? Yes. What platforms will the new software support? All of them. Will it support iOS for tablets like the iPad for instance? Yes.

This isn’t much to chew on. We know. We don’t know for example the scale of the tool. What types of problems it addresses. Or how it might interact with other BIM tools. As you can see we don’t know much yet. But we know from the source that they believe this tool is very important and the BIM market needs it.

I hate mysteries like this. I’m dying to know what this new tool is. Hopefully, we will all find out soon enough.

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Unlike Autodesk, which bought the rights to extending Spatial’s ACIS modeling kernel and has since went in-house with a new 3D geometry kernel for most of its key CAD technology, Nemetschek North America isn’t big enough to support that kind of development, despite having over 450,000 users worldwide. Most CAD companies license kernel technology from 3D CAD giants like UGS’s Parasolid, Dassault’s Spatial division’s ACIS, IntegrityWare or SMLib. 

We suspect that Nemetschek has embraced Parasolids over ACIS due to Spatial’s issues with keeping pace with Parasolids as well as the not too recent support and embracing of the Mac platform by Parasolids. UGS turned out to be its own mystery customer when it announced Mac Parasolids support back at COFES the middle of this decade. UGS’s NX (Unigraphics) is used extensively by Apple’s internal industry design and product teams. 

If Nemetschek embraces Parasolids, it would likely place VectorWorks in the most advanced standing in the area of advanced modeling as compared to Autodesk and other competitors. Parasolids today is widely seen as the leading modeling kernel on the market.

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