Gehry Technologies talks to Architosh about GTeam

Recently Gehry Technologies (GT), an AEC software technology company founded by award-winning American architect Frank Gehry, spoke to Architosh about its new GTeam online BIM collaboration tool. Architosh had previously broke the story about the upcoming GTeam SaaS (software as a service) offering and covered its official press release, but in this feature article we sit down and hear directly from Andrew Witt, Director of Research, and Matt Reid, Senior Vice President of Marketing, at Gehry Technologies, about what is happening with GTeam and how Frank Gehry feels about this new tool.

Some History of Gehry Technologies

Before we start we should begin by reviewing the corporate history of this software and services company. Gehry Technologies was founded in 2002 as a spin-off of the technology of Gehry Partners, the world-famous architecture firm. Frank Gehry’s architecture firm was already a technology company itself, having developed special tools and processes in order to help realize the commissions of its clients. The primary technology at that time at GT was its customized use of Dassault Systemes’ CATIA software, an industrial strength mechanical computer-aided design system used by aerospace companies like Boeing.

In 2005 Gehry Technologies formerly launched Digital Project, its customized CATIA platform and called it its BIM offering. This added to the industry’s existent four first-class BIM offerings from companies in the US and Europe. However, the modified CATIA-based Digital Project is quite complex to master and its take-up within the industry has primarily been to both large-scale and elite architectural firms and their commissions. It is fair to say that GT’s Digital Project has been utilized over the past decade on the largest, most complex and tallest structures in the world.

From 2005 to the present GT continued to grow but adapted and became a services company, offering its many AEC clients a range of services helping them tackle extremely large and complex buildings. GT now has more than 100 consultants in 10 offices around the world with five offices alone in Asia. In 2012 the company raised $10 million dollars in a Series B financing led by CAD giants Autodesk and Dassault Systemes.

Learning from Services and the Frank’s Legacy

Today GT (Gehry Technologies) is truly a services company. In fact, its primary revenues are coming from the services groups deployed around the globe. “After ten years of being on the services side of the business, we’ve learned a lot about collaborating on data and on what is necessary for projects to be completed,” said Matt Reid, Senior Vice President of Marketing at GT.

What actually happened over time is that GT started creating a tool for itself to help gain a competitive advantage but also–and more importantly–to provide the BIM data to those who may not have access to it. “Essentially one of the goals of GTeam is to commercialize a platform we have used here at GT for many years,” said Reid.

“Collaboration is really difficult,” said Reid, “we get a lot of feedback from people we are working with…about people using the wrong version of files, not being able to access the 3D data due to format incompatibility…” In today’s AEC industry, firms are largely still using FTP sites, emailing files, and turning things into Adobe PDFs. But GT thinks there is a better way. “We know there are tools out there for collaboration but we make an easy-to-use file sharing and collaboration solution that is purpose built for BIM data and our industry,” said Reid.

“And this is also Frank Gehry’s vision,” added Reid. “Gehry Partners is using it on many of their projects. So this is a big part of his legacy to the field and we’re excited to work with customers on building a better collaboration platform that’s readily accessible and available to the industry.” (see image 01)

Next Page: Origins of GTeam and Who Has Used It

Origins of GTeam and Who Has Used It

GTeam has been around for three years. One may think that its first use was for Gehry Partners but in fact it got its start through GT clients. The company realizes it has competitors in this niche, including Navisworks, Autodesk Buzzsaw and Autodesk 360 technology. But GT thinks this product is unique and offers strengths none of those products can match. Perhaps most importantly is that GTeam is a more open platform that supports not only Autodesk file types, but numerous others; thereby satisfying the need of project teams to utilize various 3D applications. GTeam being a light-weight cloud-based application also helps with product adoption as well as its easy-to-use functionality and maintenance.

When you are working with 3 or 300 people what becomes very important is figuring out if you are working with the right data. GTeam excels at providing this type of information, letting the user know what is the current version of data and providing a clear audit trail of that data.

For the past six to eight months the company has been offering a private service to some of the heavy hitters in AEC. Companies like HOK, Turner Construction, Safdie Architects…have all been essentially acting as beta testers of this new technology. But not all of its focus is on large firms and very large buildings.

When I asked the question about smaller firm practice Reid responded, “PGAL is not a large firm. The Pike Company is not a huge firm.” The goal of GT is to make this new online BIM and collaboration platform truly useful across a scale of firm sizes and operations.

GTeam Details

A big part of the challenge in AEC collaboration actually gains clarity from the owner’s perspective. Large building owners and operators don’t have a centralized BIM platform and they work all over with numerous architects and construction professionals. What GTeam does is provide this team member some unity by neutralizing CAD and BIM data formats and by centralizing information.

GTeam is not just a web portal that holds information but a software as a service (SaaS). It has the built-in ability to show you 3D building information utilizing its own proprietary method of showing various 3D file formats. (see image 02) It converts CAD data from CATIA, Revit, AutoCAD, Rhino, SketchUp and other formats to its own internal format automatically during the file upload process. Users then view, navigate, explore, comment and distribute on this optimized 3D information.

Of course not everything in a BIM-based AEC project is 3D data. And in this the GTeam developers also did things to address 2D and other “nD” information. Andrew Witt, Director of Research explained it this way. “Even 2D data is displayed in a preview format. We have done some particularly special things with 3D to specifically add value to our AECO customers but we also optimize 2D document viewing performance as well.” (see images 03-05)

Essentially what happens is all original file formats are stored up on the GTeam secure cloud servers. This enables others to grab those files, with permission, and work with them on their desktops or mobile devices. “It is just like Dropbox on this level,” said Andrew Witt, “what is different is that on the server there is a light representation of that [file].”

“What we think is unique about what we did is we created a platform that is open to many different file types,” said Witt, “solving one of the biggest challenges for interoperability and collaboration in the industry.”

Next Page: Learning from Facebook

Learning from FaceBook

Another key feature of GTeam is the ability to do side-by-side comparisons with the data, watching how the project has evolved over time.  Witt continues, “GTeam has a Facebook like timeline flow, so people can see what other people have done, what files they have uploaded, etcetera.” “You can also filter the timeline flow for particular actions.” Witt explained how powerful the search capabilities are and said that over time they will add in more granulated search abilities based on what users say they need.

When we asked about the importance of calendars and schedules Andrew Witt said that GTeam is not a project calendaring application. At least not yet. “It’s not for calendaring,” said Andrew Witt. “What our calendar does allow is for us to look back at a particular “state” of the project, at any point in time. That solves a lot of ‘he-said, she-said’ problems.”  Witt also told us another point of using the built-in calendar is for doing “releases.” You can actually setup calendar events for when things are due or for specific releases.

As for that other activity common to the new social web? Yes, commenting! Well, GTeam has support for that too. You can comment on files, actions and specific people. Commenting is structured around the whole of GTeam’s focus, which is largely file-centric.

Platforms and Messaging

And speaking of comments. One primary activity and use of GTeam is commenting and messaging information about the BIM data. This is achieved directly in the Web-based user interface of GTeam. When we checked into GTeam upon its discovery, the advanced 3D viewing features were mostly limited to a 3D viewing web plugin application that was only for Windows at that time. This will change very soon I’m told to continuously improve the user experience.

“The plugin allows for you to drill into the specifics of the BIM data. It is super powerful and allows things like sectioning,” said Andrew Witt. (see image 06) “We definitely have plans to roll out the plugin to the Mac platform and will be doing that shortly.” This is important to fulfill their marketing philosophy on GTeam because the plugin provides 3D capabilities like 3D measuring, 3D clash detection, 3D annotation and the already mentioned 3D sectioning which is quite powerful. (see image 07 below)

The company also knows just how popular the iPad is in the AEC world and plans to implement more of the advanced functionality carried out on the desktop eventually on the mobile platforms like iOS. Before we wrap this article up we want to mention another key item which we asked about. And that is keeping files synchronized on servers. We already know from the GTeam website that file synchronization is one of its key abilities, but servers are commonly used even in smaller practices. The short answer is yes you can synch to servers in addition to directly to your workstation or laptop. Many companies are using this functionality to enhance their data backup procedures.

Closing Thoughts

We think Gehry Technologies’ GTeam is very promising. It’s key killer feature may in the end be its ability to work with so many different BIM and CAD file types, truly offering a neutralized, open, common platform available to every participant in the AECO industry regardless of their internal or industry-favored information technology preferences. Given the large transformation going on throughout the technology industry, with new mobile platforms and the resurgence of Apple’s Mac, this is more important then ever.

The fact that they see tech evolutions like Facebook and its “timeline” or “wall” view so clearly for what it is is also extremely noteworthy, in much the same way as Finnish-based CadFaster and Hungary-based Graphisoft sees the importance of “texting” and IM to the process of team collaboration. What we see is Gehry Technologies clearly having its eye on the emergent trends taking shape in culture and technology. Like a good surfer who can spot a great wave shaping up out in the distance, GT is spotting vital trends and acting on them in their product strategy.

Finally, we can’t help but be enthused about any product that gets the importance of the wide and growing use of Apple’s Mac and iOS platforms. The iPad in particular. We tested the GTeam interface on the iPad and while not all features were completely done at the time we were using it the overall implementation looked very solid.

The company is officially unveiling its pricing schemes and offerings this October. We look forward to learning more and seeing GTeam evolve. To learn more visit them online here: www.gehrytechnologies.com/ or www.gteam.com