Trimble (USA) has a certain similarity with Hexagon (Sweden). Both began in the measurement business, Trimble in surveying and Hexagon in post-manufacturing measurements. Both are bigger in revenues than almost any CAD vendor, with Trimble last year earning $3.1 billion and Hexagon $4.4 billion, about the size of Dassault Systemes.
Both firms decided a few years ago to branch out by acquiring adjacent software. Trimble's most visible acquisition was SketchUp, but they also landed other BIM firms, such as Stabiplan International, whose add-ons work with Revit; Hexagon's most notable CAD acquisition was industry pioneer Intergraph, founded in 1969.
I interviewed Mark Sawyer last month about Trimble's place in our industry. Mr Sawyer originally gained fame as the CEO of @Last Software whose groundbreaking SketchUp software finally solved the pre-design problem like no other had (see figure 1). He sold @Last to Google. and moved on to co-found Vico Software, which developed construction management software.
With the acquisition of Vico by Trimble, he is now director of construction industry strategy at the company. Coming full circle, Trimble bought SketchUp and 3DWarehouse from Google after Google realized they weren’t all that useful to its dream of populating Google Earth with 3D models made gratis by us. (Google now uses airborne photogrammetry to generate dreadful-looking 3D representations of cities.)
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Ralph Grabowski: What role do you see Trimble playing in the BIM market?
Mark Sawyer: Trimble started in measurement, especially geolocation, and has expanded into analysis and complex solutions. But location is our roots and location is a profound piece of data in each of our five franchises:
• Agriculture
• Building and construction
• Geospatial
• Natural resources, utilities, and government
• Transportation
[Within the Building and Construction franchise, Trimble offers the following aspects:
• Alignment planning
• Building design, construction, and operation (SketchUp is located here)
• Civil and site construction, and engineering
• Construction logistics and tools
• Marine construction
Many of these tie in with Trimble's surveying instruments.]
In construction, we focus on both civil construction -- infrastructure and the classically “horizontal” work -- and buildings, “vertical work.” [Here the public relations person chimed in: "We prefer to use 'constructible' instead of 'bim' to show we are building beyond BIM."]
BIM is a combination of 3D geometry and well-managed data. Our solutions range beyond BIM by completing the lifecycle with software for architecture, engineering design, specialty contractors, and building owners. BIM is just one tool in that lifecycle. For example, we also provide field positioning, labour tracking, and capital planning.
The three-C’s in our strategy are Connected, Constructable, and Content-enabled:
- Connected speaks to collaboration aided by information management tools and purpose-built AEC workflows. We have over two million users of our Trimble Connect collaboration application, so that is a large collaborative community.
- Constructible means design information that is detailed enough to fabricate from, and not just showing design intent, with information management and embellished data.
- Content-enabled is our strategy to provide manufacturers' data – geometry and attributes -- through our MEP content businesses and/or via the 3DWarehouse, which is accessed by millions of users.
Grabowski: Is Trimble going after a particular niche in BIM with the products it has acquired?
Sawyer: On the acquisitions front, we are always active. We are in a permanent condition of acquiring companies. Recent acquisitions include...
- eBuilder project management
- Viewpoint construction accounting
Our focus these days [for our Building and Construction business] is on smarter, more informed management of resources, labour, and material.
Grabowski: Who might Trimble be targeting as customers?
Sawyer: We have groups focused on specialty trades. We organize ourselves around the customers we target: architects, engineers, capital facility and infrastructure owners, general contractors, and specialty contractors, including MEP [mechanical, engineering, plumbing] and civil. We also recognize their need to be regionalized. The component libraries we provide have pricing, connection restrictions, and so on, for accurate cost estimates.
Grabowski: Who does Trimble work with in the BIM market, such as the RVT efforts by ODA?
Sawyer: We work with ArchiCAD, Bentley’s AECOSim, and Revit, exchanging their data and in some cases developing applications running on them.
Grabowski: How good is the data that is exchanged with them?
Sawyer: Getting data out of any proprietary system is a journey, not a destination. Progress gets made; it is less of a problem than it used to be. We are working with ODA [Open Design Alliance], as well as working directly with Nemetschek and Autodesk, and we find IFCs [industry foundation classes] useful.
Grabowski: Who does Trimble see as competitors?
Sawyer: With our specific set of services, there are a large list of companies that are in each category but none that offer all we do.
- In software, we typically compete against Bentley, Autodesk, and Nemetschek
- In field positioning hardware, we compete against Topcon Positioning Systems and Hexagon Leica Geosystems
Grabowski: How does Trimble differentiate itself from competitors?
Sawyer: Having both the hardware and software gives us a leg up on the industry. It has in the past and will be more so in the future, as sites become more sensorized in the IoT [Internet of things] age. We can close a pretty tight loop between the field and the office. In the past, it took a lot to gather data in the field, but now it can be automated so we can collect more data with less effort. It has to be collected fast, because the real world changes fast.
We want to make the information flow from one project member to the next. That's why we are in all areas of construction, from design to operations.
Figure 3: Mark Sawyer, Trimble director of construction industry strategy
Grabowski: In which direction does Trimble see itself moving towards?
Sawyer: Our tenet is to organize around our customers, not around ourselves. Customers need solutions involving hardware, software, and services, and each customer is different and complex. We choose to be in all three areas because customers frequently require more than one element to successfully implement a solution.
We are going to stay the course to invest deeply in the 3 Cs. We see an acceleration in improving resource management on projects with automated data capture, AI [artificial intelligence], IoT, MR [mixed reality], indoor-outdoor positioning, connectivity, video, location-sensitive tagging, a tech-savvy workforce in the field, and software back in the office that quickly updates to deal with changes.
www.trimble.com/Our_Products
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| Here is one of the most recent posts made to the WorldCAD Access blog:
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Nanosoft releases nanoCAD Mechanica 9.0 ($300), their newest CAD application for mechanical engineers:
- 3D solid modeling kernel from C3D Labs
- Feature-based 3D modeling
- Extended export/import
- Ribbon interface
Learn more from nanocad.com/products/mechanica/updates/
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New from upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd: Ralph Grabowski's What's Inside ARES 2019 reference guide. Learn all about what's new and what's updated in the latest DWG system from Graebert. 20 pages. PDF. Full color. Free. I count 56 new and updated commands, and system variables. (By comparison, Autodesk managed to get 6 new commands into last month's AutoCAD release.) Download from dropbox.com/s/m18css87sjvziaf/ares2019-whatsmnew.pdf
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Augmented Intelligence is probably the better term for A.I., as I find it doubtful that intelligence can be made fully artificial. CIMdata PLM News is holding a Webinar later this month on augmented intelligence and CAD. Register at cimdata.com/en/education/educational-webinars/webinar-augmented-intelligence-is-critical-for-robust-digital-transformation
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Maxon, which makes 3D modeling, animation and rendering software, buys Redshift Rendering Technologies for its GPU-accelerated renderer. Price was not announced. Maxon is part of the Nemetschek Group. maxon.net/en-us/news/press-releases/article/maxon-acquires-redshift-rendering-technologies/
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Remember when Google boasted of asking job candidates dumb questions like ‘how many golf balls can you fit in a school bus?’ Google now: “Unsurprisingly those questions [aren't] predictive of future performance on the job." I love how they slide in the word 'unsurprisingly'.
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Spain's CYPE software firm licenses modules from C3D Labs' C3D Toolkit for its line of Open BIM software:
- C3D Modeler for geometric modeling
- C3D Converter opening 3D models from other CAD systems
CYPE developers integrated the C3D kernel in 2-3 weeks. /www.cype.com/en/
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Re: DraftSight News, in Case You Haven't Noticed
Dassault Systemes announced a 2019 version of DraftSight, and the free version is no longer available. My free DraftSight 2018 SP31 edition states, "IMPORTANT NOTICE: all free versions of DraftSight will cease to run after 12/31/2019."
They also list a new 3D version offering and plans for cloud.
- Doug Vander Wilt
USA
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Cloud isn't the answer. If you've ever worked on something sufficiently complex, even server drive latency can be problematic, let alone a network connection. The draw is for the bean counters. The engineers and designers suffer under cloud-based CAD. Cloud is fine for hobbyists.
- Fred Fredrick
Kalisiak Designs
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Beginning with 2019 DraftSight will no longer have a free option:
- DraftSight 2019 for Windows is offered in paid versions only
- Once you download and install DraftSight 2019 (free 30-day trial or purchased version), you will no longer be able to download or access any previous free version of DraftSight (2018 or earlier)
- All free versions of DraftSight (2018 or earlier) will cease to run after 12/31/2019.
3ds.com/products-services/draftsight-cad-software/download-draftsight/
-Mike DeKoning. senior CAD coordinator
Sealed Air, USA
The editor replies: A software company can do whatever it wants, but it would have been less nasty by Dassault to allow existing customers to use the free versions in perpetuity, and allow any better features in 2019 and later to attract payments.
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Re: What Happens to BricsCAD?
upfrontezine.com/2019/04/upf-1010.html
Thanks for your attendance and reporting on the ABC2019. I look forward to seeing your talk reproduced as an article. Minor correction, Ralph Green didn’t attend the ABC2019. After reading your article, I bet he wish he had!
- Jason Bourhill
CAD Concepts, New Zealand
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And a special mention goes out to you Ralph with your presentation (sans Powerpoint slides). This was one of the highlights from the day for myself and those I spoke to during the breaks. Thank you for sharing your time with us.
- Andy Reid (via WorldCAD Access)
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I noticed your conversation with Scott Shuppert regarding use of social media. If you and Scott would like further data on the point, this slide from our latest Global CAD Trends Survey for 2018/19 may be helpful.
It shows the ranking of social media (dead last) amongst all popular sources of information for CAD users and decision makers to keep up to date with the latest developments in the CAD industry. (This is based on survey responses from 626 CAD users and decisions makers around the world.) Amongst those who do use social media, usage was primarily of YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook -- which had identical usage levels.
- Bill Gordon, vp business development
The Business Advantage Group, England
The editor replies: Color me unsurprised.
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Issue #1,010 (nice number) and an interesting write-up. Even I got hooked to read it, till my brain started humming, felt sorry for the losers, so I stopped.
- Herbert Grabowski
Re: Running Generic CADD in 2013
worldcadaccess.com/blog/2013/01/running-generic-cadd-in-2013.html
I bought Generic CADD when I visited the US in the early nineties. I had no contact with CAD before, but with the excellent manuals, it took me only some weeks to get very familiar with nearly all its features.
Later I tried to convert to a more modern CAD program running directly under Linux, but I was very disappointed about the unergonomic behaviour. By chance I found out that GCadd runs excellent under the Dosbox. Printing/plotting worked very well with GCadd, with following restriction:
From GCadd I generate either a Postspript (extension .DEV) or HPGL (extension .DPF) file, and then I have to copy the files manually to the printing/plotting device. Printing is done with the lpr-command (linux) to an HP-Network-printer, plotting with a cat-command to a tty-device, where the plotter (a CALCOP- design mate pen plotter) is connected directly serial.
- Matthias Foerster (via WorldCAD Access)
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"I send notes. I'm not a chambermaid whom you can ring at every moment. Today, most people act like they work at a switchboard in a hotel."
- Karl Lagerfeld |
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