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Bricsys Digital Summit 2021 Bricsys, the creator of BricsCAD BIM, recently held its second annual online event. The company showcased new capabilities and updates across multiple market segments, all based on the new v22 release of BricsCAD, writes Martyn Day
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n October 2018, Hexagon’s PPM division acquired a small, innovative Belgian CAD software developer with big aspirations. Bricsys had a very competent DWG-based clone of AutoCAD and ambitions to compete in nearly every CAD vertical market, from BIM to sheet metal. Hexagon’s PPM division is all about process plant and the company could see that its Cloudworx AutoCAD add-on worked amazingly well on top of the Bricsys CAD DWG engine, negating the need for its customers to keep expensive AutoCAD seats. The move gave Bricsys the secure backing of an industry giant, and Hexagon PPM had a low-cost mature CAD platform which used the industry standard file format. As with all new arrangements, it has taken a while for Bricsys to adjust from being a small agile developer to a cog in Hexagon’s truly giant machine. At the same time it has built out its internal ‘go to market’ and established a network of 46
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resellers, bringing in people from the more commercial side of the software business. This year’s Digital Summit saw Bricsys go from a ‘folksy’ Belgian software company, which had its in-house band play at all its customer events, to something nearer to a corporate ‘American’ style software company. In many ways this was a reboot for marketing and presentation style. This is both good and bad. The messaging would certainly be more digestible to a US corporate and the event did bring in the gravitas of Hexagon, especially with a positional from Mattias Stenberg, Hexagon PPM President as to where Bricsys fits into the Hexagon PPM vision for AEC. It’s hard for an acquired software firm to maintain its identity within a corporate, but in this phase Bricsys is looking to add gravitas.
The summit For those that are unaware of BricsCAD, it’s a single platform 2D and 3D design
tool, which is based on a fast, multithreaded DWG core engine. It offers most of the APIs and development connections that AutoCAD enjoys, and has a range of features that now outstrips AutoCAD, including some mind-blowing machine learning / AI optimisations. The 3D engine is powered by an ACIS solid modelling kernel (which is also multi-threaded) and lies at the heart of Bricsys’s BIM and manufacturing developments. As AEC Magazine has stated before, BricsCAD is the only BIM system we have seen which could be used to create traditional scaled project drawings, as well as including full 1:1 working models of architectural designs for fabrication. This capability will become increasingly more useful as the industry moves to digital fabrication. Cathi Hayes, VP of portfolio strategy and enablement, gave the big picture pitch as to the product strategy. She introduced the model project to be used for the event’s tech demonstrations, the Huntsville www.AECmag.com
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