“The last thing we want to do is destroy the diversity of the application market,” he said. the AutoCAD version.īricsys is careful to avoid effort duplication - it doesn’t make sense to develop another HVAC package, for example, when there are already packages available that are tailored to local markets, De Keyser explained. “For users, I can say there is no difference … 95% of the cad functionality is exactly the same,” said Peter van der Weijde, vice-president of CADWorx and Analysis Europe and Africa, regarding the BricsCAD port of CADWorx vs. “That’s important because the typical plant models can be quite huge,” De Bastselier noted. For users to have a good experience working on the BricsCAD platform, the developers had to maintain the same workflows and performance level that CADWorx had delivered when running on AutoCAD. Luc De Bastselier, Bricsys CTO, explained that porting CADWorx to BricsCAD involved moving 3.5 million lines of code and testing more than 400 commands. “We expect the Intergraph deal will have an impact on our growth as well.” (Intergraph’s GT STRUDL structural analysis and design modeling software also is available on BricsCAD.) “Intergraph for us is a very substantial step,” said De Keyser, who takes it as validation of the extensive work the company has put into rewriting its application programming interfaces (APIs) to foster outside development. Last month, the Intergraph CADWorx plant design suite joined the list of supported applications - the culmination of a joint porting effort that began in 2015. Today, there are more than 1,200 applications running on the BricsCAD platform, ranging from mechanical design to facilities management to survey and mapping (this number includes applications available to the public and those developed for private use). “What we are good in is basic research and development - that’s the focus.”īricsys is a small company with limited resources, but it wants to meet a wide range of customer needs, so its strategy includes sharing the burden of development with third parties. “I think we will stay about 80% developers,” De Keyser predicted. Although Bricsys may need to slightly reduce its investment in R&D - which currently accounts for 40-45% of spending - during this time of growth, the company’s priorities won’t change. He is determined to keep his company lean, however, with sales shouldered by an 80-country network of resellers and a heavy emphasis on development staff. “We are starting what I would call a second life now,” said De Keyser, who expects the workforce of fewer than 150 people to reach 300 or 400 in the next 3 to 4 years. Now, the company has established “substantially different technology” than its competitors, De Keyser believes, and is ready to make itself known to a broader audience, without fear of being written off as an AutoCAD clone. “We force ourselves to be profitable, and then you have to be lean,” said De Keyser. The BricsCAD name may be unfamiliar to many who use CAD software Bricsys has maintained a tight grip on spending over its 15-year life, limiting expenses such as marketing. Although Bricsys offers rental licenses, the vast majority of its business - perhaps 95% - is in perpetual licenses, according to CEO Erik De Keyser. “We received over the past weeks, tons of e-mails from large companies saying they are fed up ,” said Mark Van Den Bergh, COO of Bricsys, at a media event held at the end of April. The Belgium-based company Bricsys, developer of BricsCAD, has experienced this firsthand. Ever since Autodesk began its transition to a subscription-only licensing model, however, these applications have been drawing new attention from professionals for whom licensing flexibility, not price, is the primary concern. Many of these competitors, which offer varying levels of capabilities, have promoted themselves as lower-cost alternatives to AutoCAD. With AutoCAD, Autodesk has long enjoyed the lion’s share of the 2D CAD market, but it is far from the only option available: Numerous companies develop competing CAD applications that support the DWG file format. Bricsys Seeks to Take DWG Community ‘Beyond AutoCAD’ 3 May, 2017 By: Cyrena Respini-Irwin Belgium-based developer expands the scope of BricsCAD with support for building information modeling (BIM), sheet metal design, and Intergraph's plant design package.
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