Inside Revizto: Global Dominance with Open BIM Coordination

IT IS VERY HARD TO FIND A MORE ENERGETIC BIM SOFTWARE LEADER these days than Arman Gukasyan, CEO and founder of Revizto, whose cloud-native BIM software platform serves some of the world’s largest and most esteemed architecture, engineering, and construction firms.

These include world-famous architects and engineering consultancies, such as the United Kingdom’s Foster & Partners, Grimshaw, and Atkins, as well as the US-based Jacobs. Top global general contractors like Skanska, Balfour Beatty, and Vinci Construction are also prominent Revizto users, and then there are owners like Siemens and the pharmaceutical giant Roche who are also enthusiastic Revizto users.

Revizto and Beginnings

Revizto’s tagline is “unifying BIM intelligence across 2D and 3D,” and it is an apt one for this cloud-based real-time BIM coordination, clash detection, and issue tracking software platform, especially since one of its unique features is the ability to easily enable users to view 2D drawings integrated into 3D BIM model views.

Such views help users fully understand a building, as the 2D drawings ensure that part of the documentation set is reflective of the 3D BIM model. Meanwhile, the model provides spatial context, allowing users to relate to the drawings and gain a simultaneous understanding of the building’s spatial and orthographic aspects. It’s like 2D plus 3D equals a kind of xD perception of a building design.

 

 

 

 

CEO Arman Gukasyan tells me that this perception is all part of what makes Revizto special to use and aligns with its ethos of ease of use and power. Gukasyan, whose background is not in AEC, first got the idea for Revizto while working as part of another startup where 3D gaming technology was married to GIS technology for 3D mapping of cities in Europe.

“When I saw the inefficiency in city planning, this is when I got this idea to bring this kind of technology to AEC,” he says. He left that earlier company in 2007 and began to envision what is today Revizto.

Learning early on that there is upwards of 20 percent waste in the construction industry alone, Gukasyan was nonplused. “When you ask a GC for a price on a one hundred million dollar building, they have already budgeted into that price around 20 percent of waste,” he says. “This just blew my mind.”

“That sort of triggered me into starting this business,” he adds. “I wondered, ‘how do we bring all this data from tools like Revit and SketchUp and bring this data to all stakeholders so people see the same thing and make the right decisions?’ This was like the whole thing to me.”

Gaming and Ease of Use

So why start with building Revizto with gaming technology? Was it a faster way to develop, saving millions of lines of code? Actually, that is not the major reason but a partial reason.

“The reason is that gaming technology could actually consume heavy data on the one hand and be very simple and interactive to use on the other hand,” he continues, “so anybody in the project can actually consume and leverage that data.”

Revizto utilizes only about seven percent of the Unity game engine. “We have built seven million lines of code on top of that game engine,” he adds. What they really leverage in Unity is more than just the 3D environment and its capabilities, but the fact that developing with Unity enables them to easily take Revizto cross-platform to many operating systems and types of devices. From this perspective, Revizto leverages the inherent advantages of what we refer to as the BIM 2.0 era tech stack.

Revizto is a cloud-era app, but not a cloud-first one. Core Revizto functionality is available through its native desktop and mobile apps, while its Web-based issue tracker is accessible from any modern browser on a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. The native app runs on Mac and Windows desktops, as well as iOS and Android tablets and smartphones.

Unique Power

Leveraging Unity means having an advanced 3D technology that can crunch down 3D models from all kinds of CAD industry modeling kernels and create light-weight, high-fidelity, accurate model equivalents inside Revizto.

“We have huge enterprise clients doing massive giga projects in the Middle East, and they are running on Revizto very well because we know how to minimize all those polys,” says Gukasyan. “We are the only platform that can handle that amount of data, and we have consumed over 280 terabytes of project data to date,” he adds.

Extreme Power in Open BIM Tool

With the capacity to scale from small BIM projects to the world’s largest infrastructure and building projects, the next factor that makes Revizto truly special is its openness. “We are OpenBIM oriented,” says Gukasyan, adding, “we want to work with everyone.”

“When we say we are OpenBIM, we are saying we are platform agnostic. We have developed for all the authoring tools out there worldwide, from Autodesk, Bentley, Nemetschek, and Trimble, both plugins for their tools and direct imports,” he adds.

 

 

 

 

Gukasyan says that regardless of the authoring tools an architect or engineer uses, Revizto can bring all of that into one interactive, real-time, collaborative platform. In some sense, Revizto is making up for the failures of buildingSMART’s IFC format as a de facto open industry standard.

When asked about IFC and its importance in the industry and its relevance to Revitzo, Gukasyan doesn’t mince words. “The short answer is that in the United States, IFC didn’t fly and it is not flying still.” He admits, though, that in the UK, Germany, and the Nordics, the IFC standard is “a little bit of a standard.”

“In many of those countries, the owner contracts say that the owner is to get a deliverable in IFC,” he notes, acknowledging that in the United States, in particular, owners often demand a deliverable in Revit, a closed BIM lingua franca format used extensively between US architects and MEP and structural engineers.

Closed — An American Problem

“I will tell you, Anthony, that one of the key challenges in the US market is that some of the dominant players still keep their formats closed,” says Gukasyan. “They want everyone to be on their platforms only, but I will tell you, Anthony, that the [AEC] market is so large and diverse that no single company can chew this market fully.”

So, in other words, any attempt to swallow the entire market only leads to a type of figurative and literal choking. I remind him that we clarified this in our coverage of the Revit Open Letters, and that Autodesk and Nemetschek recently signed a shared open API agreement, from which no further announcement has been made.

“Anthony, it is one thing to say you want to be open, and then it is another to say it with your actions,” he continues. “There’s still work to be done across the industry to move toward greater openness and interoperability.”

Gukasyan further insists that no one tool can serve all the different types of specialties in the building industry. “One tool that can do all your project types truly well doesn’t really exist; that is why if you are opening up your formats, you are making life easier for your users.”

“This is what we are trying to do,” he adds. “Whether your sub-contractor is using a Nemetschek product or a Bentley product and your architect is using Revit, Revizto can consume all of those formats, get them aligned simply, and then enable full BIM integration and coordination into one single platform.”

Open — A Global Success

Revizto’s openness is central to its global success. It works with everyone, typically through dedicated plugins for those authoring apps. This includes Autodesk Revit, Trimble’s massively popular SketchUp, the popular Rhino 3D advanced modeling software, and all rival Bentley and Nemetschek BIM authoring platforms, especially Archicad and Vectorworks Architect.

This openBIM orientation is why global architects using a variety of authoring tools should themselves engage with and utilize Revizto. In the United States (and also globally), Arman Gukasyan says SketchUp is massively used, mostly in projects over 30 million USD. With such large projects, interior designers benefit from the coordination strengths of Revizto.

However, the bulk of Revizto’s users are general contractors. “60 percent of our core customers are GCs,” he notes. That means 40 percent are users, split between large owners, engineers, architects, interior designers, and other specialists.

Some of these other specialists are FM professionals. “During Covid, many airports digitized their facilities when they were closed or partially closed,” he adds. “We see these airport customers inside Revizto now and using it for FM (facilities management),” he added. “They can use it to do their QA and QC in Revizto.”

Filling the Critical Gap in the Market

Part of the success of Revizto stems from focusing on the core problem. And what is that problem the industry needs so badly?

The answer: Delivering a single-source-of-truth (SSOT) federated BIM coordination platform that works with everyone.

When coordinating BIM models from engineers and architects who all use best-of-breed solutions from different software providers across various formats, simply bringing all those elements together is virtually non-existent in the global AEC world. Gukasyan addressed this need in the vacuum created by an industry of major players focused on bringing users onto their platform.

The Autodesk – Nemetschek API agreement was actually an acknowledgement that this approach is a failure. (see, Architosh, “Autodesk and Nemetschek Group Partner on Interoperability,” 24 April 2024). Nicolas Mangon, Autodesk Vice President of AEC Strategy, told Architosh that “Today the technology landscape is complex and there are lots of tools from both Autodesk and Nemetschek, plus the many startups which you know very well.”

While the intention is in the right direction, the API sharing agreement doesn’t change the nature of the solutions Autodesk and Nemetschek offer to the market. At present, neither offers a direct comparable solution. The problem, as stated above, requires genuine openness, a wide-ranging approach to making all tools and users feel welcome, the capacity to support the largest models possible, and, of course, focus.

While Autodesk has its ACC and its Navisworks, Gukasyan says Revizto is singularly committed to collaboration. “We are focused on the collaboration industry, not the authoring industry, not the MCAD, nor movie industry tools,” he says.

Focus is King & Different

Gukasyan notes that in the US, especially, the market is served by a massive generalist. And largely, this generalist is excelling in the market vis-à-vis the economics of network effects.

This comes at a cost, and one of those is that the United States is far from being the most advanced nation in BIM users. “Countries like Germany, the UK, and the Nordics are much more advanced BIM users than the USA,” says Gukasyan. When I ask him how he knows this and to provide specifics, he notes that 30 percent of Revizto users are in Europe and the Middle East, 30 percent are in the APAC region, and 40 percent are in the Americas (north and south).

 

 

 

 

“One advantage we have is that we have larger users everywhere around the globe, and we are capturing their expertise and bringing that wisdom to our other users globally. Our teams work with and see global practices in action. And, Anthony, I can tell you that, in terms of the most advanced BIM workflows and processes, Australia and New Zealand are far ahead. They have the most advanced processes and automate everything.”

Closing Comments

Readers new to Revizto may have unanswered questions that my chat with Arman Gukasyan actually addressed. One question is, who is the nearest competitor to Revizto if Autodesk is not?

Gukasyan emphasized several times that Revizto is not a CDE (common data environment), so it is not competing with tools like Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC), Aconex, or Trimble Connect. At the same time, what makes Revizto unique isn’t just its openness combined with far more power to handle large models; Revizto’s philosophy is centered on coordination and collaboration, and hence works to avoid building system clashes from the outset.

Yes, Revizto also features advanced clash detection for modeling coordination checking. However, its ability to federate every kind of model input and provide a best-in-breed Issue Manager, as well as a best-in-breed 2D/3D hybrid viewer, means that systems are coordinated better earlier, resulting in fewer clashes being found.

Readers may also be wondering about model checking, like Solibri. Revizto isn’t focused on model checking either. And what about this giga-BIM model viewing boast? Yes, it is true that Dalux also boasts its ability to handle massive federated BIM models.

“If you speak with Dalux, they don’t view us [Revizto] as a competitor,” says Gukasyan. “Why is that? Because they primarily sell their Common Data Environment (CDE), and their BIM Viewer is free with the CDE. While Dalux is similar to us, our focus is on collaboration and coordination.”

“If you’re talking about an integrated collaboration platform—and we are talking about an agnostic platform and agnostic perspective—any model into Revizto and then enabling a simple, fast, BIM coordination platform for all your project members. This is where our solution is and where we are deepening even more.”

 

---

Editors Notes

Revizto is sold to different AEC/O stakeholders through unique packages for their needs. For general contractors and large owners, a single license enables an unlimited number of users and project-based pricing.

For architects, engineers, and interior designers, who are the primary license holders, packages focus on model-based pricing. Revizto offers much discounted pricing for architects and engineers using it alone, while architects and engineers end up using it for free as part of projects where the owner or general contractor is providing access to Revizto-based projects.