Nemetschek AG Joins buildingSMART International’s Strategic Advisory Council for Better Interoperability

This week Nemetschek AG of Germany, the parent company of 12 leading AECM (architecture, engineering, construction and management) software and services companies, along with Autodesk, Trimble and AE firm HOK, has joined buildingSMART International’s start-up Strategic Advisory Council (SAC) as a founding member to foster better interoperability between stakeholders in the built environment industries.

The aim of the buildingSMART International-initiated Strategic Advisory Council is to gather a group of senior representatives from the world’s leading international businesses operating in or serving the built environment. The intent is to merge the commercial experience of major industry stakeholders with buildingSMART’s vision of a universal collaboration format for building models; enabling the efficient and quality exchange of information between the various software solutions.

Viktor Varkonyi, Member of the Executive Board of Nemetschek AG, said “The Nemetschek Group welcomes this strategic initiative. Nemetschek and buildingSMART share the goal of ensuring that open standards, such as IFC and BCF, become the undisputable standard for model-based collaboration in the AEC industry. Ultimately, we want to ensure that end-users can build their collaborative workflows based on the highest possible quality neutral data exchange. The guarantee for our success lies in the fact that all the Nemetschek Group Companies as well as Autodesk and Trimble are committed to this very same goal.”

In addition to the data format standards, an equally important component of success is to further develop the market engagement for the deployment of such open standards. A closely-related, major role of SAC will be to advise buildingSMART International in its market evangelization activities. Nemetschek welcomes the immediate priority of buildingSMART to extend SAC membership to consultants, contractors, product manufacturers, operators and owners representing all major verticals of the AEC industry.

About Nemetschek AG

Nemetschek, Munich, is a leading global software provider for the AECM industry (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Management). From more than 40 locations worldwide and with its 12 brands, the Nemetschek Group serves more than 1.2 million users in 142 countries. Founded in 1963 by Prof. Georg Nemetschek, the Group has always focused on innovations such as, e.g. Open Building Information Modeling (Open BIM) for the AECM market of tomorrow. The company, which has been listed on the stock exchange and in the TecDAX since 1999, generated revenues of EUR 185.9 million in 2013 with an EBITDA margin of 24.9 percent.