At its annual user conference this week in London, Bricsys, a developer of CAD software that has provided open, collaborative construction design technology since its founding in 2002, announced that it had been acquired by Hexagon AB and will become a part of Hexagon PPM (Plant, Process & Marine). With the Bricsys acquisition, Hexagon strengthens its construction solutions portfolio and position for the Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC ) market.
The acquisition should help Bricsys make inroads to the North American market, and could prove to be a great opportunity for gaining prospective current (disgruntled) Autodesk customers, developers, and resellers. It will be interesting to see how Autodesk responds as this looks to be a real challenge to its historical territory.
The acquisition also brings potentially strong implications to Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence, but more about that later.
Its CAD platform, BricsCAD, supports 2D/3D general, mechanical, and sheet metal design and building information modeling (BIM) in one system. It’s 100% based on the de facto standard design format (.dwg), providing access to many vertical CAD applications created by thousands of third-party developers. Bricsys also offers its own set of artificial intelligence-driven add-ons – from conceptual modeling to seamless BIM workflows and cloud connectivity.
“Hexagon has long been a leader in structural & process piping design. The Bricsys acquisition extends our domain expertise into building design, adding walls, floors, doors, and other construction related features,” says Hexagon President and CEO Ola Rollén. “More importantly, we can now provide the AEC market with an end-to-end platform – with conceptual design, CAD design, BIM software and collaboration tools, project and cost controls, in-field construction execution tools (work packages), and progress documentation (reality capture) – to connect, automate, and ultimately ‘autonomize’ the entire building and construction ecosystem through our HxGN SMART Build solution.”
Headquartered in Ghent, Belgium, Bricsys will be fully consolidated and operating within Hexagon’s PPM division, although that could expand over time.
Intergraph Process, Power & Marine – acquired by Hexagon AB in July 2010 became known as Hexagon PPM. Hexagon PPM has focused on technology that drives the design, construction, and operation of industrial facilities and large-scale construction projects. “PPM” was retained as a nod to the key industries of process, power, and marine; however, Hexagon PPM has expanded its base to serve industries beyond its traditional core.
During his presentation, CAD management consultant, Robert Green, now a BricsCAD management consultant, cited a strong potential demand from AutoCAD users for an alternative, more economical, yet capable CAD platform. Green claimed that BricsCAD offers a superior return on investment when compared with AutoCAD, starting with first-year acquisition costs of $750 for BricsCAD Platinum compared with an outlay $1,600 for a first-year subscription to AutoCAD. Green says the three-year cost differential works out to a $3,310 savings by using BricsCAD, as well as “ease of adoption, a familiar user interface, and low training costs.”
Beyond architecture, BricsCAD supports 2D/3D general, mechanical, and sheet metal design as well as building information modeling (BIM), all using AutoCAD’s .dwg file format standard. BricsCAD uses Open Design Alliance (ODA) code as its geometry engine, although Bricsys has added its own artificial intelligence utilities and other innovations to set it apart from competing drafting products.
Bricsys said that what the ODA did for .dwg, makjng it more open and accessible, it is now doing for .rfa, the native file formats for Autodesk’s Revit and NavisWorks.
On the mechanical side, the Bricsys acquisition by Hexagon could be a nice fit and complement with metrology (Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence), CAM (Vero Software), simulation (MSC Software), and sheet metal design (Forming Technologies).
When V19 is launched later this year, Bricsys will introduce BricsCAD Mechanical, which replaces a previous add-on to BricsCAD Platinum for sheet metal design. BricsCAD Platinum has folded in its previous Sheet Metal add-on to become V19 BricsCAD Mechanical. However, BricsCAD MEchanical is not an AutoCAD Mechanical knockoff because it provides full history-free 3D design with on-demand parametrics with hundreds of standard, parametric components. New tools in BricsCAD Mechanical include automated exploded views, extensions to the bill-of-materials (BOM) generation process, and automated kinematic animation.
The software imports most major 3D CAD formats using an add-on utility called Communicator (which will be rolled into BricsCAD Mechanical sometime next year), converting them to .dwg fo editing within BricsCAD.
BricsCAD is based on the ACIS Modeler solid modeling kernel, developed and supported by another rival, the Spatial Technologies division of Dassault Systemès. AutoCAD also employs ACIS, but the forked version, where Autodesk developers took a copy of ACIS source code and continued independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software.
Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire…Autodesk users that think they are improving their situation are sadly mistaken. The grass is not greener! Just ask around.