BIM 360 Growing Fast

I normally don't go and reprint press releases.

They mostly don't have that much technical content, anyway :-)

This one is important enough to warrant it, though, and may easily have slipped by you unnoticed if you are purely focussed on the Revit API and desktop applications.

Let's look at:

Building and Infrastructure Industry Customers Surge to Autodesk in Fourth Quarter

Autodesk BIM 360 Cloud Services for Construction Among Company’s Fastest Growing Products Ever

In the last fiscal quarter, Autodesk closed dozens of new and expanded deals in the architecture, engineering, construction and infrastructure industries. As adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) accelerates around the globe, firms in the building and infrastructure industries are increasingly subscribing to Autodesk's software solutions.

In the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries, Autodesk had strong fourth quarter to close out a record year with revenue for its AEC product Suites growing 32 percent year-over-year. The company booked a significant number of million dollar plus transactions, including the largest in Autodesk’s history. Autodesk BIM 360, cloud and mobile services for construction management and jobsite execution, saw especially strong customer uptake and has become one of the company’s fastest-growing products ever.

"As architecture firms, contractors and engineering firms are realizing the true power of Building Information Modelling to improve just about every aspect of the design and construction process, customers of our BIM solutions are driving massive gains in productivity through reduced errors, rework and cost. In particular, our cloud and mobile services are seeing a surge of demand because they help make the value of BIM available anywhere, anytime, from the office to the jobsite," said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of Autodesk's Information Modelling and Platform Group.

New or expanded deals to provide Autodesk BIM solutions to architecture practices, engineering firms and contractors as well as building and infrastructure asset owners, include AECOM, Black & Veatch Corporation, China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), Fluor, HDR Engineering, Qatar Rail and PCL Construction, among many others.

Turner Construction Company, one of the largest construction firms in North America, is a customer that has seen great benefit from Autodesk BIM solutions, notably including its use of BIM 360 on an Oakland International Airport renovation project. “Autodesk BIM 360 Glue is not just visualization. It supports information collaboration and has improved our efficiency,” says Lincoln Wood, of Turner Construction Company. “The mobile app is the next horizon of coordination and communication with the field. As a contractor, I think the field is in a position to really leverage this technology in exciting ways.”

In January, the European Union issued a directive to its 28 member states recommending the use of BIM on public works projects. That move follows other BIM mandates of varying scope in countries including Australia, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, United Kingdom and United States.

Contractors have now surpassed architects as the fastest growing adopters of BIM. Over the next two years, contractors expect the percentage of their work that involves BIM to increase by 50 percent on average, according to the 2014 McGraw Hill Construction Smart Market Report covering construction in major global markets.

"There are strong tailwinds behind BIM around the globe, and Autodesk is at the forefront of this business process transformation, helping our customers realize the full potential of BIM to collaborate, simulate, visualize and optimize project outcomes," added Hanspal, senior vice president of Autodesk's Information Modelling and Platform Group. “We are working tirelessly to provide the tools and services that enable our customers to radically improve how buildings and infrastructure are designed and built, and our customers are clearly responding.”

Conclusion

Well, what do you think?

I am looking forward to hearing from you where you will be taking this yourself!

Expanding your Revit add-ins to extend beyond a single project on a single desktop?

I want to spend much more time on web and mobile related topics.

To start with, I really need to buckle down with my cloud-based Tech Summit presentation...

At the same time there is Revit 2015 and its important API enhancements coming up as another big new fascinating topic...

Two Reading Recommendations

I have two reading recommendations, both prompted by participating in the Ultracode, IoT and Robotics meetup in Munich last Thursday night.

You really ought to know what IoT stands for...

I mentioned the importance of the IoT and the complexity it entails when recommending the book Trillions – Thriving in the Emerging Information Technology after the Tech Summit last year.

Marc Pous, founder of theThings.IO and one of the meetup presenters, pointed me to another much shorter and rather historical groundbreaking article, The Computer for the 21st Century, by Mark Weiser, who coined the term ubiquitous computing back in 1988.

Trillions is much more up to date, both are still extremely relevant and include some surprising twists, even for professional IT guys.

By the way, both Mark Weiser and the authors of Trillions worked at Xerox PARC back before the era of GUIs, Apple, Windows, etc.