Architosh Talks to Viktor Varkonyi, CEO Graphisoft

Technology has changed dramatically in just the last five or six years. We now expect a constant connection to the people and information that matter to us regardless of where we are in the world and what type of device we happen to have with us at that moment. With fast 3G cellular networks, ubiquitous WiFi access points, and affordable broadband at home and in the office the ability to now stay “connected” means that a whole new range of “opportunities” can exist.

In this interview Varkonyi explains that Graphisoft began to realize these new possibilities back in the middle part of this decade. The company spent years studying and thinking about how architectural practice was going to change in the face of these new technologies. The result of this has been the new ArchiCAD 13 with BIM Server.

This talk delves into both the industry and cultural aspects of the BIM Server and its ramifications on global practices, gaining work in this depressed economic environment, and its affect on the competition. Moreover, Viktor Varkonyi explains for the first time some of the detailed explanations behind the creation of the BIM Server.

The Interview

AFR (Anthony Frausto-Robledo): What drove the primary decision to create the new Graphisoft BIM Server? What was essential about that decision?

VV (Viktor Varkonyi): The primary driver was to provide for the growing number of users coming to BIM a collaboration environment that fully utilizes BIM for teams in the daily design work. We invented Teamwork 1.0 in 1995 with ArchiCAD 5.1 and at that time it was a huge invention that really revolutionized how architects can interact with a virtual building model. But technology had dramatically changed since then and by “offline” being replaced by “online” as the standard we felt there is a revolution coming in model based collaboration as well and with Teamwork 2.0 in ArchiCAD 13 we wanted to be the driver of this change.

What you see around you now, for example, is that you have an iPhone and you can get any information anywhere you are, the Internet is accessible everywhere now, everybody can have a laptop these days. The general expectations on speed, connectivity and user interaction have changed dramatically in just the last few years.

AFR: So are you saying that it is essentially technological advancement that has driven your decisions behind creating the Graphisoft BIM Server?

VV: Yes. And with this technological revolution, especially email and the Internet, architectural practice has changed. More and more practices have gone global, for example. By global I mean they have more than a single office location. Many of our user accounts have multiple offices here in the US and several have offices over seas.

AFR: So were your users with multiple offices asking for this technology?

VV: Yes and no. Five years ago no. Things were very different just five or six years ago and the BIM market has changed a lot in that time. For us there was an effort to try to find a way to link these offices, so when we go back five years to when we started looking at this problem we recognized that what we did in 1995 was great for the time being but the industry was going to face huge challenges going forward.

AFR: So are you saying that collaboration is the big differential about BIM going forward, that this is the most important technology in BIM?

VV: Giving focus to collaboration is extremely important. It is one of the most important issues today. At the same time this is something you cannot fix or achieve overnight. When customers evaluate BIM solutions they often conclude feature level differences, which might be addressed by the competitors in the “next version”. It is just the matter of development priorities. Efficient team workflow with high performance on BIM projects are different things – they require constant focus through many years even touching the software architecture itself. For several years it has been a high focus for Graphisoft and here we feel we are well ahead of anybody else in the marketplace.

AFR: It sounds like Graphisoft today is better positioned than ever before to compete for large multi-office practices because of Graphisoft BIM Server and the new Teamwork 2.0. Are you deliberately trying to compete for the larger firms?

VV: Yes, but please don’t misunderstand that this BIM Server thing is just for the big guys. I would say it is at least as good for the small and medium sized firms as well. It might sound strange to hear that but there is a misperception in the market that the big projects are only dominated by the real big firms; that’s not true, the really big design offices are only able to drive more big design projects simultaneously. Really big projects are driven in many cases by 20, 30, 40 person offices that I wouldn’t call big accounts. At the same token these offices have in most cases enough reputation to be able to bid for projects and eventually win them.

AFR: So do you feel that the way the architectural industry is going is that bigger and bigger projects can be tackled by smaller and smaller teams, because of the way technology is aiding the design and process? Is that sort of what you are saying?

VV: I think when we talk about the Western world the answer is definitely yes. But when we talk about Asia BIM doesn’t get too much attention because the labor force is very cheap. It is much cheaper to utilize a well-trained 2D workforce and just let them work.

AFR: That’s very interesting, I didn’t know that about Asia. What about the small firms and solo architects…how is BIM server of great value to them?

VV: Teamwork gives a lot of value even for the freelancers. Especially in this economy when the job market is down. Hopefully we will have a recovery quite soon, and then there will be lots of start up companies. Here in the US it is a trend that outsourcing is gaining much more momentum. It is a huge trend that the smaller offices get the work from the bigger ones. So when you have this system setup where these really small practices can be an integrated part of these large practices that is a huge advancement and change in the industry.

AFR: Absolutely, I can see a lot of things happening with that.

VV (Viktor Varkonyi): I have an interesting story where we have this client from Australia who is trying to build up an office in the Middle East. Nobody from the team wants to move to the Middle East to start up a branch office from Australia, so how can they build and integrate a trained workforce? We have never considered ArchiCAD 13 can provide a significant value on this matter. But the feedback was imminent from costumers; with ArchiCAD 13 and BIM Server they are able to have minute-by-minute connections to a workforce in the Middle East and this enables among others a best-case training scenario. So you do not have to relocate people and deal with the costs. So there are lots of things that are just coming to the table now.

AFR: In our current BIM market research we are a bit surprised by just how much Revit users are aware of ArchiCAD 13 and its new BIM Server technology–it clearly made an impression on them. And some of them are telling us they are now evaluating it. Were you expecting to get this kind of reaction from the Revit crowd?

VV: Well…the answer of course is yes. But the real question that everyone has to first evaluate is what they have today. Do they have a solution that works the way their practice works? Do they have the collaboration capabilities they dream about having? If team work and inter-office communication and collaboration are very important to them, then I think we have a very good answer today and a vision for tomorrow that can revolutionize what is the current understanding about working in teams.

AFR: What is state-of-the-Art with IFC and interoperability? Where does it need to improve?

VV: The 2×3 platform is close to five years old now. Many companies incorporated it by now, the standard is stabilizing and now it can become really an open standard. And this is what the industry missed in the last couple of years, the platform was changing and, yes, unfortunately it often resulted just a 90 percent solution with ten percent missing…but now there is really a great chance for the industry to embrace this open standard.

AFR: How does the Nemetschek Group as a whole play a part in reinforcing the value of IFC? How do you understand that?

VV: The whole Nemetschek Group treats it as extremely important and it’s a primary platform for collaboration.

AFR: People are telling us in our BIM research that they are concerned about what the BIM industry will look like five or ten years from now. They see Autodesk building a complete horizontal stack around Revit and thus are concerned that true interoperability  via neutral standards will be at jeopardy. People really want an open industry standard, not a dominate file format again. Even Revit customers, if they are really honest, will tell you they want an open standard.

VV: But they use RVT files. In the long term they want an open industry standard but in short term they support these proprietary things.

AFR: Right, which is a conflict of interest…

VV: But I am very happy that things started to change. Let’s take for example a yesterday example , Texas State, the state government, has made IFC the official method for submitting your BIM model. This is extremely important because it gives lots of credibility, and that was a future-looking decision they made.

AFR: And I know in Europe and elsewhere other governments have standardized around the industry standard IFC model.

VV: Yes, absolutely, IFC is very strong in Europe, especially in Scandinavia.

AFR: We are going through the Great Recession here in the US, money is tight, yet you have a great new release out with some exciting new technology. How successful has been the adoption rate with your current customers?

VV: So far extreamly good. It is a very tough economy but our customers are very excited about this industry-first technology and the enormous values it brings to them. The whole Graphisoft customer family is about passion; most of our customers really love the product. They are just as proud as we are about ArchiCAD 13. They know they are using a technology that enables them to implement solutions that nobody else is able to do. It is not just about design teamwork, but connecting all stakeholders of the building process. Chuck Goodman at Irwin-Pancake Architects is a perfect example for this. What he is doing with ArchiCAD 13 is truly amazing.

AFR: I have talked to Chuck recently so I am aware of that.

VV: What is even more important is that ArchiCAD 13 helps firms to develop their own vision. The tools are so powerful that they can now use it uniquely to build unique features into their delivery of architectural services to their clients. So it is vision-building for them.

AFR: As I mentioned earlier, my colleague and I are currently doing BIM market research and we are amazed to hear how Revit users are talking about the Mac, particularly Apple’s laptops, which seem to be in a lot of Windows firms now. Umm…ArchiCAD runs on the Mac and always has. Are you guys seeing an increase in interest in your BIM solution because it runs on Apple and people these days are just increasingly interested in Apple?

VV (Viktor Varkonyi):  Absolutely. Graphisoft and Apple are in a very long-standing, very close relationship. The whole company was started on the Apple platform. Even our old logo was very similar with the Apple-Apple. The Macintosh platform was always a significant competitive advantage for us. I am very happy to see that Apple continues to gain market-share in our segment. The performance, the reliability, and of course the beauty of the new Macs is a perfect fit for architectural practice.

Architects are artists. They love the beauty, they love the ease-of use, they like the fluid smooth things. Apple computers were always very popular among architects. Because today there is a huge hype around these Apple technologies, I am not surprised at all that they are gaining momentum.

AFR: And are you seeing some of that run off on you guys in a good way? Are some people telling you they are interested in ArchiCAD because they need a BIM solution and ArchiCAD runs on the Mac?

VV: Yes that is definitely happening. Let me share with you a nice story. It is very easy to support the Mac today, Apple is very popular, extremely popular. When we look around at an airport, in a coffeehouse, schools or any other place we just see the increasing market share. On the other hand I have a friend who has a quite old black MacBook but he does not want to replace it to the new aluminum one. He does not want to belong to the crowd for fashion, he wants to display he has been a Mac fan for ages.

That’s funny…that shows you about emotions. (laughter…)

AFR: Yes, definitely. (laughter).

AFR: I would like to shift gears a bit and talk about the Delta Server technology. You guys are talking about a magnitude of reduction with the file size being communicated. How important is that piece to the success of collaboration and the new Graphisoft BIM Server?

VV: That’s not file size reduction it’s communication reduction, it’s the network reduction.

AFR: Oh, yes that’s right. How important is that piece?

VV: Extremely important. I think that’s the bread and butter of it.

AFR: The bread and butter…of the Delta server technology or the BIM Server or both?

VV: For both. Because believe it or not we had no optimization for the wide area network access. None. The whole system is working over a normal DSL Internet connection. It works so well over the Internet because we did a great optimization on the LAN network. And that’s because we reduced the network traffic in a very meaningful way.

AFR: How so?

VV: Look, it is not just about being able to sync to the server in a fast and efficient way, but about what tools you can give to the customer to support the team. If we are in a team and I am being efficient I know what you did an hour ago, or ten minutes ago. And now we have the ability to communicate within the BIM model itself. I can click on a particular element and send that to you with my thoughts within the context of the building. You just click on it and ArchiCAD 13 automatically takes you to that part of the building, highlights it, and displays my note to you.

AFR: That’s amazing. But just to be clear, what I want to know is if I modify the model–some part of the building–and then sync with the BIM Server, what I want to know is does that delta in the data on my computer get subjected to a file compression schema before that change is sent to the BIM Server?

VV: No. Not at all.

AFR: Why? What is making it so small? Is it just that what I have done is small in itself?

VV (Viktor Varkonyi): Yeah, exactly. So–and this is a crucial fundamental thing in the new approach with ArchiCAD 13– is that what we have learned is that the designers want to communicate on an extremely frequent basis. With Teamwork 1.0, in 1995, we had an assumption that designers work with a way that the central file should be consistent all the time. So I am a designer, I download the file, I work on it and I will submit my results only when I have finished my work at the end of the day.

AFR: At the end of the day?

VV: At the end of the day or at the end of the week, whenever I have finished my task. It depends. Now we know it was a false assumption because designers just want to interrupt, they want to share their ideas. And the new system is really rewarding this because the more frequently you communicate the more real-time you are. And it’s really just one, two, three or five seconds to pass over your data. Of course if you stay away from this dynamic team behavior for a day or two this data can get bigger and take a bit longer time but even in that case you don’t reach the limit of one-two minutes.

AFR: One minute? Even if I don’t sync until the end of the day?

VV: Of course it depends a lot on the project structure. But our customers are giving us feedback and even when they are working with the older habits they are telling us it is dramatically faster.

AFR: So I am assuming then there must have been some dramatic algorithm changes made to ArchiCAD 13 to allow the data itself to get smaller. Is that right?

VV: Yes, that was a huge part of the work. That was the fundamental work. Because building information modeling is a complex system, because everything interacts with everything. We have spent a great deal of work to clean up the relationship management without compromising either the intelligence of the BIM model or the flexibility required for work-sharing –the relationships are even stronger than before. The data management is much more efficient and robust. If I touch a wall, then I can submit only that wall, all the relationships stay correct and changes get properly propagated without compromising performance.

Re-engineering ArchiCAD’s database alone was two and a half years of work. And this is quite new. You are the first journalist I am talking to about this. ArchiCAD 13 comes with a completely re-architected system and internal database.

AFR: So you essentially re-wrote the entire engine of ArchiCAD 13?

VV: Absolutely. You cannot make it without doing this. But we have tremendous expertise with doing this kind of development. We know how to write code that can be well maintained, managed and be able to be modernized quickly. We have been doing this for over 20+ years, we have developed the know-how how you can keep-up with the latest technologies.

AFR: Some people say older code bases are very difficult to advance and update.

VV: My view is quite the opposite: it is a huge advantage that we have been through major optimizations and now we are at a level that’s beyond some serious roadblocks our competitors will just have to arrive at soon…and the best proof of this is the level of innovation we are delivering with ArchiCAD 13 and its new BIM Server.