While there were some interesting items of note from the multinational hardware companies mentioned above—and I’ll get to one very interesting one from HP at the bottom of this article—the focus of below is squarely on the software companies largely serving the Asian AEC markets. One final note before we look into some of these companies. All of the exhibitors took to the conference stage on day one to discuss their companies, services, and products for the AEC market. This wetted the appetites of KCC attendees and press alike to visit their booths during conference session break periods.

Exhibitors of Interest

AKL FlowDesigner

Advanced Knowledge Laboratory, Inc., is the maker of AKL FlowDesigner, a computational fluids dynamics (CFD) software aimed at the AEC industry. The purpose of this software is to visualize wind flow and temperature distribution, something not easily understood as to its effects on buildings, but vitally important with large or complex structures and especially in urban sites where complex wind flows are generated by nearby buildings.

01 – FlowDesigner as a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool for architects is quite unique.

AKL FlowDesigner has many uses for architects and urban designers, including air flow analysis in urban environments, air conditioning analysis of arenas, indoor condensation analysis, ventilation duct heating analysis, among many others. Models of buildings and environments can be imported into this CFD software using formats such as IFC for BIM models, SketchUp, STL, and 3DS formats. The Japanese made software is aiming to democratize a typically complex piece of engineering software. It simplifies the application of this technology, helping architects bring analysis technology to the front-end of the design process so they can iterate designs in response to the impacts of wind flow.

02 – Screenshot of FlowDesigner showing simulation of AC cooling system large space. (image: screenshot of YouTube video)

03 – FlowDesigner showing urban wind simulation. (image: screenshot from YouTube video).

I saw something like this years ago at AIA National Convention, by Altair Corporation, but it was a demo and not a shipping product yet for architecture. AKL FlowDesigner is today a shipping product for architects. ARCHICAD architects can import their building designs into AKL FlowDesigner using IFC and run numerous analyses and simulations. Moreover, given the strong connection between ARCHICAD and Rhino and Grasshopper, it is worth noting that there is a new Grasshopper component of FlowDesigner as well. To learn more, you can visit them here.

smartCON Planner

Another interesting piece of software is smartCON Planner, developed by Kajima Corporation and distributed and supported by another exhibitor named Doalltech, an AEC solutions provider. smartCON Planner is software for the construction side of the AEC world; it’s for general contractors and other building professionals. Kajima itself is one of the world’s largest construction companies and one of the top 5 largest construction companies in Japan.

smartCON Planner helps eliminate errors by visualizing the construction process itself via 3D models. It works inside ARCHICAD itself and therefore is technically add-on software to the core BIM application. The best way to quickly understand what smartCON Planner does, however, is through watching a demo movie (see below).

smartCON Planner is pretty amazing and helps builders visualize and plan scaffolding, crane lift operations, earth anchor placement, and road deck placement, among other things. It comes loaded with 3D model elements of items builders use in construction for these operations and processes, thereby enabling them to plan and visualize the construction workflow to find and troubleshoot problems virtually, which is so much cheaper than troubling-shooting construction issues in real-time on the job site.

Doalltech is a Korean company and is the distributor of smartCON Planner.

dRofus

dRofus was also an exhibitor at the 2017 KCC in Kyoto and is the newest subsidiary of the Nemetschek Group in Germany. dRofus is a planning and data management tool squarely focused on the “I” in BIM. The application is particularly strong in architecture segments like hospitals and airports. Darren Tims, a principal at HDR | Rice Daubney, Australia, a presenter at the KCC, also discussed his firm’s use of dRofus and praised it for its unique capabilities.

dRofus is a database application, principally. Data can sync between it and BIM tools like Revit and ArchiCAD and run bi-directionally. dRofus also supports IFC workflows. The program features four modules: (1) Rooms, (2) Room Data Sheets, (3) Items, and (4) Systems. The first module is fundamentally an aid in the architectural brief or architectural programming development. Owners, owner reps, users, and the architects and planners can drop in information in the Rooms module, while the “Room Data Sheets” add even more information to specific rooms using a data sheet format which is fully customizable.

04 – dRofus is the latest Nemetschek Group company and was a key exhibitor in Kyoto. Due to several presenters discussing the use of dRofus, the company attracted many visitors to its booth.

“Items” is the third module and helps the user organize FF&E, services, door, window and finishes data and is again, bi-directionally linked to the Building Information Modell (BIM). “Systems” as the fourth module helps organize all data related to components in the MEP and engineering and technical environments. This module is currently only available in Scandinavian versions, but an international version is underway.

To learn more about dRofus visit them here on the web.

next page:  More ARCHICAD Third-Party Apps, Rebro 2016, and Something Special From HP

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A Global Growth Story

Varkonyi began his talk about discussing the company’s global growth story and put up a slide that was a type of customer density map on a global scale. (see image 01-A) One could instantly see that while the company has customers all around the world their greatest concentration of customers clearly lies in Europe.

Put another way, Europe is where GRAPHISOFT has its highest market share. But the next slide showed the growth story, which was quite interesting for two points. The first is that in Asia the company had astounding growth over the past year; from 2015 through 2016 growth in Asia was at 42%, a sharp contrast to its flat growth in the Americas. (see image 01-B)

01-A – GRAPHISOFT’s global customer distribution map.

01-B – GRAPHISOFT’s growth by region clearly indicates acceleration in Asia.

This Asia growth did not just instantly come about. The Budapest-based BIM company has been laying the foundation for growth in Asian countries for years, including key agreements in China and Singapore as well as initiatives in South Korea. (see: Architosh, “GRAPHISOFT partners with buildingSMART Korea to foster national BIM standards,” 19 Dec 2014). It seems that the fruits of this labor are starting to really accelerate and that is a key takeaway from this early part of the presentation.

As for the issue of flat-ish growth for just one year in the Americas, this looks like an outlier year when compared against the earlier five years in the Americas which saw very strong year-over-year growth as well. Overall, the growth picture is confidence-building and was no doubt an important point to lead off with to its opening presentation to over 300 key client conference participants in Kyoto.

A Final Preamble About Japan

Graphisoft’s Japan story is largely centered around its key partnerships with the country’s largest construction companies and its strategic development partnership with Japan’s largest architecture firm (really an architect-led AE firm), Nikken Sekkei. Architosh will delve into this in upcoming KCC 2017 reports but suffice to say now, presentations by these firms at the Kyoto event showed firm commitments and interesting technology impacting developments on the software development side.

This leads us to the most interesting part of Varkonyi’s opening talk—the future.

The Future Slide—Three Points

In putting up the most interesting slide of his talk, Varkonyi outlined key points about GRAPHISOFT but also as it relates to the Nemetschek Group as a whole. In the slide below (image 02), there are three key points, roughly related to the top, two middle, and two lower horizontal bar zones in the picture.

Algorithmic Design

The first is about how ARCHICAD is linked to the front end of the design process. And this is all about McNeel’s Rhino and Grasshopper programs. For both marquee design firms and significantly large AE firms, Rhino and Grasshopper are vastly important tools. This was abundantly apparent in the many presentations. GRAPHISOFT wants to further expand in this area in two ways, one of which we cannot talk about and the other we can. On this last point, the company wants to bring its ARCHICAD-Rhino-Grasshopper Connection technology down to the level of GDL.

02 – Viktor Varkonyi, CEO of GRAPHISOFT outlined future directions for the company and its technology at its Kyoto-based key client conference this week.

GDL is the company’s powerful scripting-based language for accessing powerful parametric modeling capabilities, but not many architects will ever become truly comfortable with scripting and coding skills as compared to those who will find the node-based visual scripting tools in Grasshopper much more accessible.

The Construction Industry

The second point about this slide is ARCHICAD and BIMx will further serve the industry in the areas of construction. With so many mega-large construction companies in Japan and Asia embracing ARCHICAD GRAPHISOFT recognizes there is room to expand in this direction. This doesn’t mean there will be dedicated services engineering solutions but rather specific solutions and capabilities will be expanded in the future. BIMx for its part will become more open via an API so it can become an information access platform in its own right.

Varkonyi stated that the era of working on multiple federated BIM models is going to be over. “Architects and engineers are going to be working as one team,” he said. “They will work on a shared building model—no more data conversions or maintaining multiple instances of the same design models…”

To serve the entire AEC industry better, GRAPHISOFT’s BIMcloud will be opened up to more than ARCHICAD users, via an API (application programming interface). IFC is still hugely important to GRAPHISOFT and the Nemetschek Group as a whole, but an API will make direction connections possible so third-parties can query information and manipulate properties in the BIM data. What Varkonyi was really talking about is GRAPHISOFT as a data platform.

“Teams will eventually build a real construction model,” said Varkonyi.

Common Data Environment

And finally, BIMcloud and Bluebeam will serve critical roles throughout all phases from predesign through operations. Importantly, the Nemetschek Group sees Bluebeam becoming its Common Data Environment (CDE) solution and thus will compete with CDE’s from the Group’s main rivals (Autodesk, Bentley, Trimble) and major CDE point solutions.

03 – Varkonyi opened up the 2017 KCC in Kyoto with an intriguing keynote talk about where the company is going.

If you are kind of surprised to hear the term CDE applied to Bluebeam, don’t be. Smart PDFs are one very logical step in the Bluebeam path towards becoming a true CDE.

In a GRAPHISOFT press luncheon, Varkonyi stated that the key factors in a successful CDE are that it is web-based. Currently, Bluebeam’s flagship desktop tool is Revu and is desktop-based with a cloud-based connection to Bluebeam Studio. This is not the same thing as being entirely web-based, so it is the Bluebeam Studio product that Varkonyi told press was the component that can serve as the CDE for the Nemetschek Group.

Meanwhile, as Architosh broke a unique story a few months ago, Bluebeam opened a branch office in Boston, and that office looks to be building out the web-based versions of Revu. This is necessary for the company—which despite having market share leadership in major US construction companies—has significant competitive pressure from several all web-based solutions from Plangrid, Procore and others.

Architosh Commentary

Viktor Varkonyi’s opening overall discussion painted an ambitious perspective about where GRAPHISOFT wants to take its technology. The discussion about Bluebeam was the first time I’ve heard a Nemetschek Group company discuss another sister company’s technology as part of a group strategy. It appears that the Nemetschek Group is starting to reveal aspects of its group utilizations of recent strategic acquisitions. Discussion amongst press privately tends to continuously wander back to how the Group will drive synergies among the brands to strengthen each other and the whole company. This event in Kyoto clearly offered a glimpse of the strategy behind the scenes.

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For two days conference sessions from key customers will showcase both how ARCHICAD is used in architecture workflows as well as in construction workflows. Additionally, on day one nearly a dozen third-party developers and vendors also presented their technology solutions, while another dozen vendors round out an extensive hall of exhibitors immediately adjacent to the main conference hall.

01 – The GRAPHISOFT 2017 KKC launched with a welcome reception at Kodai-Ji Temple & SODOH Restaurant.

Companies like fellow Nemetschek Group sister company Bluebeam and dRofus were exhibiting and presenting while both HP and Dell are here discussing their desktop and mobile workstations. HP has a new mini workstation we will be discussing in a future report which makes setting up a VDI simple for the small firm—something badly needed in the market. The beauty of that solution is that it supports Macs.

Following on North American BIMCON 2017

This event follows less than two months from a similar event held in the United States but that one involved specific lecture-style learning sessions and for professional continuing education credits. This event is different, more formal, and the first time press have been invited to attend and thus Architosh has the pleasure of being here in Kyoto to report on the various presentations by some of the largest AEC companies in Japan, as well as major and often very large architecture offices from around the world who have based their BIM workflow around ARCHICAD.

02 – At SODOH Restaurant the nearly 300 attendees were treated to Geisha performances along with good eats and drinks. Attendees seem to very much enjoy the atmosphere.

Some of the objective goals of our reporting on this event include:

• Learn in more detail specific game-changing features in the latest ARCHICAD 21
• Gain an insight into future directions with both ARCHICAD AND BIMx
• Gain additional insights about common Nemetschek Group directions and contextualize that around other industry players
• Learning about the many Japan and Asian market BIM and AEC tools working with ARCHICAD
• Meet and learn more GRAPHISOFT’s key customers both from Japan and elsewhere

Finding out how some of the Asian region’s major players are utilizing GRAPHISOFT’s solutions to accelerate the Asian market’s BIM transformation is also important to Architosh’s reporting this week.

Highlights Coming

On the first day of the conference GRAPHISOFT’s CEO led the introductory talks with some fascinating comments and details about the Hungarian BIM software company’s ambitions and where Bluebeam fits into these plans and those of the whole Nemetschek Group. The premier of ARCHICAD 21 was also more extensive than anything shown thus far on the company’s website and there were additional comments about research underway about BIMx and ARCHICAD.

Stay tuned this week for additional reports. Architosh has a special section just for this event’s reports on the home page.

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