An Eventful Start to 2007

Happy New Year! The year 2007 has certainly got off to an eventful start. To start with, there came the stunning news announcement just before the holidays that Graphisoft, developer of ArchiCAD and Virtual Construction solutions, was going to be acquired by Nemetschek AG, a leading European vendor of software solutions for the design, construction and management of buildings and real estate. Nemetschek AG is already the parent company of Nemetschek North America which develops and markets the VectorWorks line of products. Nemetschek AG also has its own flagship building design product, AllPlan, which has evolved into a multi-disciplinary suite of BIM solutions that are very popular in Europe. The acquisition is expected to be completed only in March, and it is still too early to speculate on what it means for the three distinct product lines, ArchiCAD, VectorWorks, and AllPlan. But this joining of forces of the two leading European AEC software vendors is certainly a very significant development, which is likely to have implications for AEC technology implementation worldwide.

There were also some significant new releases of design and modeling applications that support the MacOS, just in time for the annual Macworld show that was held in San Francisco from Jan 8 to 12. The lineup includes SketchUp 6 from Google, VectorWorks 12.5 from Nemetschek North America, and form•Z 6.1 from auto•des•sys Inc. All of these, along with the latest products from Apple, are described in more detail in AECbytes Newsletter #29 on Macworld 2007, along with a brief discussion of the Graphisoft acquisition from the perspective of Nemetschek North America.

The agenda for this month also includes a look at how Autodesk's new facilities management application, FMDesktop, integrates with Autodesk Revit to work with its BIM data rather than having to re-create the building information from scratch, and two new Tips and Tricks articles, one on working with AEC CAD Standards and Projects in Autodesk Architectural Desktop, and the other on using the new Drawing Tool to place external drawings in ArchiCAD 10.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > January 2007