The future of CAD software
Bricsys, the global provider of the BricsCAD® brand of engineering design software, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Founded in Belgium in 2002 by Eric de Keyser, Bricsys has grown from a single CAD solution to serving the broader AEC market with a range of integrated products, including BricsCAD BIM and BricsCAD Mechanical. Today, the company has more than 300,000 users, ranging from small architecture firms to some of the largest engineering organizations around the world.To get more news about mechanical cad software, you can visit shine news official website.
PBC Today sat down with Bricsys CEO Rahul Kejriwal to learn its secrets for developing successful CAD software and where Kejriwal sees the software evolving in the future to better serve the AEC industry.
We have several products. BricsCAD is our core solution, which we developed to provide designers, contractors and fabricators with a simple design software that was fully compatible with their existing tools.
We offer a CAD platform that supports everything from 2D design to 3D modeling, all based on the use of a single .dwg file format. Rather than jumping from one file type to another, or one software platform to another, users gain a continuous workflow from design through fabrication, fully supported by high data quality and integrity.
We’ve built upon the success of BricsCAD with three other solutions. BricsCAD BIM is a comprehensive solution for building information modeling. BricsCAD Mechanical supports the mechanical design within AEC spaces. All of these solutions are offered together within the BricsCAD Ultimate package. In addition, we offer a cloud collaboration product, Bricsys 24/7. This ties everything together by simplifying the real-time transfer of data.We think of Bricsys as David in the “David vs. Goliath” software development landscape. Within our industry, there are several large, incumbent players that have been around for 40 or 50 years. In my opinion, a lot of these larger companies lost their way somewhere along the line. In the early 1980s and ’90s, they delivered cutting-edge software. Yet in the last 20 to 30 years, technology innovation seems to have stalled. The industry has been stuck. When we speak to customers, interoperability remains a big issue.
For example, everybody talks about the efficiency BIM is meant to deliver. There was a promise that these tools would strengthen efficiency within the construction industry, yet we haven’t really seen that carried through the entire AEC workflow. Instead, we’ve seen small step advantages that continue to be forced down different industry silos. BIM was meant to eliminate these silos.First and foremost, anything and everything we create is open. Interoperability is our first pillar. All users need to be able to get data in and out of the software as seamlessly as possible.
Take BricsCAD BIM, for example. BricsCAD BIM is entirely compatible with IFC because when we started building BricsCAD BIM, we put IFC first. However, at that time, we had all of these users still using .dwg. It didn’t make sense to leave them behind. Thinking about interoperability as our key pillar, it became clear that everything we do on the BIM or mechanical side must always be compatible with what we do on the CAD platform side. The engine driving use of this software is the same to support seamless interoperability.
For example, one of our largest customers is a large manufacturer of industrial fixed and motorized shutters. Several years ago, they held thousands of licenses for ARCAD, SolidWorks and Revit to support the design of these shutters, mechanical integration, and installation guidance respectively. Ultimately, they replaced the 3,000 seats they held across three different software licences with BricsCAD Ultimate, which includes mechanical, design and BIM tools within one CAD product. More importantly, they secured a seamless, .dwg-based workflow that simplified the process of transferring information across software solutions.
What has really made a difference here is that we haven’t acquired our technology — we’ve developed it ourselves. Many of those large, incumbent companies in the market are an amalgamation of acquisitions. They have one core product, but they’ve bought a bunch of other products to sit on top and expand their offerings. However, some of the pieces don’t fit well together because they were never meant to fit well.
