Nemetschek Group Reconfigures Executive Board—New Leadership Structure

Late on Friday, the Nemetschek Group announced a new Executive Board and leadership structure change. The change ushers in significant role adjustments for existing and new board members—including GRAPHISOFT’s CEO, Viktor Varkonyi.

Leadership Reconfiguration at Nemetschek SE

The Supervisory Board of the Nemetschek Group has announced a new integrated division structure for its Executive Board and leadership team. The new Nemetschek Group divisions better reflect the company’s global strategy: to pool the expertise of its 16 strong brands to more effectively serve customers in the AEC industry across all phases of the building lifecycle.

The new structure also ensures that the close collaboration each brand has with design, build and manage customer segments directly impacts the Group’s strategy.

01 – The Nemetschek Group presented at AIA 2017 under a more unified front with close alignment on the show floor and a unified press announcement.

The new leadership team of the Nemetschek Group now consists of the following members with division focus structure:

• Patrik Heider — CFOO (chief financial and operations officer). A member of the Executive Board since March 2014, Heider remains in his core role as CFOO and is also Spokesman for Nemetschek SE. He is responsible for the Group’s main functions and for positioning the Group on the financial markets.
• Viktor Várkonyi — CDO (Planning and Design Division). A member of the board since December 2013, Várkonyi’s new role sees him with overall strategic alignment for the Planning and Design Division of the Nemetschek Group as a BIM market leader for end-to-end AEC workflows. Importantly, Viktor has stepped down from his previous role as CEO of GRAPHISOFT to fully focus on this new position.
• Jon Elliott — CDO (Build and Construct Division). Bluebeam’s CEO has been promoted to the Executive Board and his primary responsibility is for the global cross-brand strategic positioning and international expansion of the brands in his division. In this new role, Jon will remain as Bluebeam’s CEO.
• Koen Matthijs — CDO (Operate and Manage Division). In this new role, Matthijs will focus on creating a strong portfolio for his division, including the further development of solutions from Spacewell and Crem Solutions.

Absent from the Executive Board is Sean Flaherty, who served the Group for more than eighteen years, the last five as Chief Strategy Officer. Nemetschek SE says he left the company of his own accord at the end of 2018.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Nemetschek’s new visional structure, as announced, isn’t particularly surprising, given the last two major announcements coming from the German-holding company. The first of those announcements came back in December of 2017 when Architosh got the exclusive on the Nemetschek Group’s strategy to develop a group-wide CDE (common data environment) solution based on Bluebeam Technology at its core. That project, as we just recently touched on, is still under development. 

MORE: Architosh Exclusive—Nemetschek Group Unveils Its CDE Strategy with Bluebeam Technology at its Core

The above announcement was the first true indication that the Group was taking active and far-reaching steps at driving at a synergistic change that could link-up customers across all its brands at various stages of the design-build-operate cycle. As we noted in the article just mentioned a year ago, the big trend is in getting customers “into a complete digital workflow.”  That workflow as far as the AEC space is concerned must begin with the design-phase (and admittedly the pre-design phase is looking increasingly important as data and AI drive new offerings that focus on the operators in early-stage development), then move to the build phase and finally to the operating phase. 

In the era of IoT, smart cities technologies, and intelligent buildings, the phases do not run out in a linear path and just end. They loop back on each other. This brings up the second significant announcement that portends this divisional board evolution—the formation of Spacewell. 

Just announced at the end of February, the Nemetschek Group’s ‘Spacewell’ brand, along with Crem Solutions, form the building operations and management division that Koen Matthijs will lead. That idea about looping back data from design, build, through operate back to the beginning of the loop is pictured in a Nemetschek Spacewell diagram shown here on our story.