Architosh Looks Back at 2014 for Mac CAD and 3D

[Edit. Note: This article saw further minor edits on 1 Jan 2015, 8:55 am. EDT]

It’s that time of year when publications far and wide sum up the year’s biggest highlights. The general goal is to ask and answer the question: 2014 was the year of the “fill-in the blank”?

The Biggest News Items of 2014

Trimble on the Move

2014 saw some of the most stunning acquisitions taking place in the software world serving both CAD and 3D professionals. Two acquisitions in particular stood out as they affect Mac-based CAD professionals the most. The first of these is the acquisition of Gehry Technologies by Trimble Navigation Limited. This major move by Trimble saw Gehry Technologies’ innovative and promising GTeam online BIM-based collaboration tool become Trimble Connect.

Trimble is a company that is fast-moving in the AEC software space as it gains traction on the design-side of the BIM workflow. First Tekla, then SketchUp, and now GTeam means it is also a design-side BIM software company with very deep pockets. One of the reasons why Frank Gehry decided on Trimble, acknowledging that there were other offers, is because Trimble could throw a lot of software programmers at GTeam. Similarly, Bacus told this author that a similar capability was an attraction when Trimble acquired SketchUp from Google.

What’s particular interesting to think about is the idea that both SketchUp and GTeam may blossom rapidly into much more expansive tools given the bandwidth now available to their development under Trimble. Moreover, Trimble has broad plans to link all their applications under the umbrella term “Trimble Connected.”

Nemetschek AG Lands Big in US Construction

The second big acquisition announced this year of major importance to the markets we cover was the Nemetschek AG acquisition of Bluebeam Software Inc. The details of that announcement discusses the mutual compliments the two companies offer each other. In a nutshell, Bluebeam rules in major US construction companies but will gain broad access to major construction markets in Asia and Europe where the Nemetschek Group is particularly strong. In exchange, Bluebeam’s new status as a Nemetschek Group company aims to expose the group’s superb AEC software set to new customers within the world’s largest construction industry.

The effect of this acquisition goes beyond adding one more growing and profitable software house to the German holding company—it offers synergistic low-hanging fruit between Nemetschek’s many BIM applications and Bluebeam’s collaboration studio tools for construction and design professionals. Importantly, for this site’s many readers, we should probably expect to see a speedup on the development and release of a native Mac version of Bluebeam’s desktop software, because this will be key for the group’s many European customers in particular.

GRAPHISOFT Wins Big in Japan

Back to one of the Nemetschek Group’s holdings, Graphisoft of Hungary started the year with some major news in Japan. The company, in March of 2014, announced major partnerships and adoption by four of the five largest Japanese AEC companies, including, Nikken Sekkei (4th ranked global architecture firm), Maeda Corporation, Kajima Corporation, and Obayashi Corporation. Most of these companies were already ArchiCAD customers but the formal announcements at the BIMcloud event in Toyko solidified and formalized adoption further and in particular the partnership with Nikken Sekkei really saw significant commitment and future offspring potential.

MORE: Why one of Apple’s most notable developers is winning big in Japan

To unpack this more for readers, what the latter partnership means is that Graphisoft will develop custom solutions to meet Nikken Sekkei’s specific practice needs, but the fruit of that development is non-proprietary to Nikken Sekkei. That’s not a concern for the 4th largest architecture firm in the world, where a natural partnering culture, a legacy carry-over from the Japanese cultural history of keiretsu enterprises, encourages sharing of knowledge and expertise to benefit all (in Japan).

What we believe may be coming down the pike for ArchiCAD users worldwide is onboard support for Rhino in the way of round-trip interoperability. This is speculation on our part but Nikken Sekkei really utilizes Rhino so much that the company wrote its own translator between the two. They also did so for connecting their own structural analysis software to Tekla for modeling and documentation. Note, that Tekla is a Trimble company and a supporter of Open BIM.

Autodesk and Openness

Although not a news item in its own right, one of the more interesting things this author heard this year came from Angi Izzi, who is head of global strategy and business development at Autodesk for its AEC markets. During a private press meeting at AIA 2014 in Chicago, Ms. Izzi noted, on several occasions during the talk, that Autodesk is further embracing openness within the industry and recognizes that not all AEC customers will choose to round-out their workflows with all-Autodesk solutions.

Autodesk’s openness in terms of platform and devices is being duly noted in our latest executive features coverage where, on the record, the company touts this requirement of openness; so Ms. Izzi’s comments are not unique. During the Graphisoft Japan BIMcloud event it was noted during the presentations, in front of press and its major Japanese customers, that the culture of partnership in Japan (already mentioned above) matched better with the Nemetschek Group’s Open BIM and buildingSMART worldview than with US-based giant Autodesk and its worldview.

So what does this really mean?

In the world’s largest AEC market—the United States—Autodesk is enjoying not only the benefits of its dominant marketshare (thanks to the history of AutoCAD) among AEC firms, but the “Kleenex-type” branding of BIM as Revit. In the same way American’s say “I need a Kleenex” when they need to sneeze and want a tissue, far too many US-based architects and AEC pros say “we have moved to BIM” when what they mean to say is they have adopted and started to use Revit.

I suppose this is the same problem Yahoo and Microsoft have with the Net-era verbal phrase “just google it.”

While Autodesk may benefit from this mostly US-based narrow understanding, to its credit the company holds strategic advisory council membership with buildingSMART International and thus, by default, must stand behind the adoption of Open BIM and the development of open industry standards.

Looking down the line, at Architosh we see openness always in two ways: adoption of open industry standards for interoperability, and the targeting of multiple devices and platforms which are existent and popular. On this latter front Autodesk as a company is ambitiously doing this through its 360 platform cloud initiatives. Many hope that this is just their way of buying time on the Revit front so they can eventually target OS X at a very high level. As it stands today, many architects are running Revit on Macs on Boot Camp mode and have no plans to ditch their Macs.

Conclusions

2014 has been an engaging year for AEC software journalism. There have been many exciting stories and changes in the industry. To summarize the four big items noted above, we have three big key software multinationals competing globally for users’ attention and fidelity. All of them possess and hold much beloved and key software tools, and all of them are directly competing with each other. An Apple vs Microsoft race is not what is ultimately in the best interest for the AEC industry so this trifecta of superpowers shaping up does something that Apple and Microsoft never managed to do—cooperate.

And it’s cooperation that ultimately is in the best interests of the end users in the AEC industry.

next page:  10 Stand-Out Players to Watch in 2015

10 Stand-Out Players to Watch in 2015

There was a lot of exciting action on numerous fronts in the CAD and 3D markets in 2014. These 10 companies and their products are things to look for as the new year unfolds.

1. Sefaira — this company was awarded the Innovation category honors for 2014 AIA BEST of SHOW. We like to think that our BEST of SHOW honors will help identify companies that are likely to be acquired by larger companies. We can see Trimble acquiring Sefaira in 2015.
2. Rhinoceros — we have not written much about Rhino lately, largely due to the slow pace of news regarding the OS X version of Rhino. Yet Rhino is a key tool in the AEC world, and due to shifts in the AEC software landscape due to news already mentioned, we could see this company being acquired as well. And even if they don’t—which is probably where the smart bet is—they will still be delivering interesting innovations.
3. OTOY — Jules Urbach may be the most driven, talent-laden wiz kid (who is no longer a kid) in the technology world today, certainly in the CAD or 3D world. OTOY matters for a multitude of reasons by one important one is they are bringing apps to your browser in a big way, including Revit.
4. formZ — AutoDesSys, Inc. needs a big hit. The once darling of the 3D world has been living in the shadow of SketchUp and Rhino for far too long. Word is a new native scripting language will turn formZ 8 into a Rhino+Grasshopper competitor and enable its devout customers to finally do the types of numerical, scriptable math-laden parametric modeling they want to do. Best of all, the company could be the first to do this on the Mac natively.
5. Autodesk A360 Collaboration for Revit — Formerly the artist know as Project Skyscraper (don’t you just love code names?) 2015 will be an interesting year for this new collaboration tool, as the trending, we believe, will be for truly open online collaboration tools (more like Trimble Connect) that can work with a multitude of 3D models. It will be interesting to see if private walled BIM gardens rule the day or public gated BIM gardens rule the day.
6. OnShape — this US based startup has an illustrious veteran team and some say their sights are squarely aimed at SolidWorks. OnShape intends to apply cloud, web and mobile technologies to CAD. If this product is done as well as Fusion 360 and offers the functionality and more of SolidWorks, it can be a big day for users on any platform.
7. e-on software’s LumenRT — LumenRT is one of the coolest visualization applications in existence and it sprung forth from a trusted 3D software maker focused on the digital natural landscape. This is a company that we would not be surprised to see acquired by a larger player.
8. solidThinking Inspire — This innovative tool brings FEM analysis technology to early stage design and focuses on creating lighter structures at any scale. Already used by advanced architectural engineers, we can see this company advancing this package nicely to make it more accessible to more architects.
9. Pixar RenderMan — Pixar’s RenderMan is now at version 19 and the big news this year was the big updates and new licensing options including the new free license model. We see some real potential here for RenderMan to grow within the industry downstream from the big studios. Word of impending new RenderMan plugins for leading 3D suites is a promising sign.
10. Morpholio LLC — this innovative company that brought you Morpholio Trace has developed two other truly gorgeous and useful apps in Exhibit and Board. And version 2.0 of Trace advances an already great app. While Autodesk has spent a small fortune developing dozens of iOS apps, some of which are great and others so-so, its rivals may choose to simply acquire standouts like this company.

It should be noted that these are just 10 chosen highlight companies and products. We could easily come up with 10 more. We hope in 2015 we are pleasantly surprised with new technologies and products from both old and new companies alike. Happy New Years!