Architosh Talks to Viktor Varkonyi, CEO Graphisoft

Continued from page 3

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.