While no press release has been sent out to our knowledge, Vectorworks Inc, has announced that Dr. Biplab Sarkar is retiring in March of this year and will be handing over the helm at Vectorworks to Jason Pletcher. This is the first time Vectorworks has transitioned to a new CEO who is an outsider to the software company.
Dr. Sarkar
Dr. Biplab Sarkar came to Vectorworks 25 years ago and put in charge of its geometry modeler and rendering technologies. He would later become CTO before rising to CEO in 2016. As this publication has noted for well over a decade, Dr. Sarkar’s stewardship of Vectorworks’ core technologies have been instrumental and often brilliant. He was a driving force behind the decision to embrace the Parasolid geometry modeling kernel many years ago, putting Vectorworks’s geometry engine future on a world-class foundation. In a similar vein Dr. Sarkar as both CTO and later CEO kept Vectorworks’s underlying code base future-oriented and future-proofed often similar to the spirit Steve Jobs would encapsulate when talking about “skating to where the puck is going be” rather to where it is now.
Dr. Biplab Sarkar, CEO of Vectorworks, Inc, set to retire in March after a prolific and instrumental career at the Nemetschek Group daughter company.
As an example, Vectorworks supported the ARM processor architecture on the Mac platform before its very Mac-friendly sibling company Graphisoft. As I write this, ARM just announced today they will be launching their own chip (rather than just creating the chip architecture and licensing it) in a move that industry analysts say could upend the semiconductor industry. ARM is also central to the Stargate AI Infrastructure plans announced at the White House by President Trump.
This publication has been telling its readers and cautiously warning about the critical path the ARM architecture is taking and ground it is gaining on Intel X86 for years now. Unlike many of its rivals in the AEC software industry—especially its chief BIM rival—Vectorworks has been supremely well-positioned to capitalize on its underlying robust support for the ARM chip architecture. The credit to this goes to the long history of Dr. Sarkar’s forward-thinking leadership.
In appreciating Dr. Sarkar’s remarkable track record at the company, Nemetschek Group CEO, Yves Padrines remarked:
On behalf of the Nemetschek Group, I extend my sincere gratitude to Biplab Sarkar for his visionary leadership and invaluable contributions. Over the past 25 years, he has been instrumental in Vectorworks’ success, driving innovation in the Design & BIM industry. His passion, dedication, and strategic foresight have left a lasting impact, and we are immensely grateful for his leadership.
While Dr. Sarkar’s leadership is noteworthy on technical fronts he has also expanded Vectorworks’ market leadership in verticals, including in the entertainment design industry, and geographically in multiple global and expanding countries. He also oversaw the the successful transition to subscription licensing.
Jason Pletcher
Dr. Sarkar hands over the reigns at Vectorworks to Jason Pletcher, its new CEO. Pletcher comes to Vectorworks from GoCanvas, a recent acquisition by the Nemetschek Group where at GoCanvas Pletcher was serving as chief operating and financial officer. He is credited with nearly quadrupling GoCanvas’ business in just five years. Prior to GoCanvas he held leadership positions at multiple companies including Genscape (Energy Information) while serving as CFO.
