ArchiCAD is BIM Product of the Year in the UK Fourth Year in a Row
BUDAPEST, November 27, 2014 — GRAPHISOFT, the leading Building Information Modeling (BIM) software developer for architects, has announced that ArchiCAD 18 has won the prestigious BIM Product of the Year award at the ninth annual Construction Computing Magazine Awards in the United Kingdom. This is the fourth year in a row that ArchiCAD has been honored with the top BIM product award. In addition, GRAPHISOFT’s BIMx was the runner up for Mobile Technology of the Year, while ArchiCAD 18 was runner up for Product of the Year.
Affectionately known as ‘The Hammers,’ the Construction Computing Awards showcase and reward the technology, tools and solutions for the effective design, construction, maintenance, and modification of commercial buildings, residential and social housing and civil engineering projects of all sizes. Hundreds of industry guests gathered recently in London to see the outcome of the readers’ on-line voting and judging panel’s deliberations.
“It’s great to see votes from users and readers deliver GRAPHISOFT a strong showing not only for ArchiCAD and BIMx, but also for the outstanding work of our partners and customers,” said Akos Pfemeter, Vice President of Marketing, GRAPHISOFT.
Along with the highly prized product awards won by GRAPHISOFT, ArchiCAD architect LSI Architects was honored with Collaboration Project of the Year. UK Partner GRAPHISOFT Connect was runner up for Channel Partner of the Year.
About GRAPHISOFT
GRAPHISOFT® ignited the BIM revolution in 1984 with ArchiCAD®, the industry-first BIM software for architects. GRAPHISOFT continues to lead the industry with innovative solutions such as its revolutionary BIMcloud®, the world’s first real-time BIM collaboration environment, EcoDesigner™, the world’s first fully BIM-integrated “GREEN” design solution and BIMx®, the world’s leading mobile app for BIM visualization. GRAPHISOFT has been a part of the Nemetschek Group since its acquisition in 2007. Visit archicad.com to see the most important milestones in ArchiCAD’s 30-year history.
Phil Allsopp
This is great news……however, there is a great deal that needs to be done in the US to reap the same rewards.
This is just my 2 cents on the topic but I think that Graphisoft needs to really focus their efforts developing the large corporate and manufacturing sectors (including the gigantic hospital sector) where facilities management is a very big deal indeed. Its these organizations who form a critical client base for architects. Thus, getting the FM leaders in those sectors to adopt ArchiCAD would mitigate the usual knee jerk reaction by many clients that their Architects must use Revit or Microstation because those products are in use by FM departments.
I think I’ve mentioned this problem before but it sometimes feels as if Graphisoft doesn’t speak corporate business language or has little interest in shaping the buyer marketplace. That’s how it feels but I could be off base of course. I will say though that Architects are not buyers of professional services and the technologies they use – large corporations are. Shape and influence this sector and you open a floodgate of demand for Graphisoft products.
Jared Banks
I don’t disagree! My hope is that as GS learns how to market BIMcloud, that’ll be a great offering for those larger businesses.
Andy Ross Thomson
Absolutely agree with you here Phil. GS has not properly connected with buyers here. Revit projects are almost never 100% completed w/o resorting to CAD at the CD phase. I used to do presales with Ardent (reseller) – we at least got into the big firms to present an alternative to Revit – but the presentations fell apart when we could not demonstrated integrated MEP and Structural components like Revit has – even though they don’t work as advertised.
Emre Erdogan
I’m a novice evaluating Archicad with some experience in Revit, but I want to add something from my perspective here.
I personally agree that Revit will need to fall back to Autocad to properly complete a CD, also there are some serious issues when falling back to autocad. Imho the most important one is that, if any of the families have one instance parameter (whether used or not), all the copies will be different blocks in Autocad. For example all similar windows or doors have different blocks, so you cannot fix them in one step by editing block in Autocad.
This happens with all Autodesk software. People think that they will operate well with each other. But for example you can’t send a good revit file in Max. I used Allplan before, and Allplan could save native C4D files in year 2000, not some cumbersome fbx. Also I was using Allplan to “flatten” site DWGs, and exported them back to Autocad, because Allplan did better and smaller dwg. So better connection between Autodesk software is not so true imho. I cannot comment for Archicad though.
But, even with this situation, there is a perception / reception or whatever you want to call it, people think while Archicad is better for design, Revit is superior at CDs. Don’t ask me why.
In my situation, this can’t be true because there is no easy way to add plaster on structural columns and beams in Revit, I guess they don’t plaster the columns and beams in US. But we do here, and this reinforced concrete construction is standart in my country. Unfortunately we don’t generally use timber joists, etc.
There is also another reception among Archicad users that Archicad is easier to grasp. I disagree, because I can’t yet get comfortable with the dimension tool for example. Revit is easier to get into. But I’m still evaluating Archicad, but I miss things like this from Revit.
And as I stated before, Autodesk Design Suite got the “Architectural design software” award on the same show, they are probably promoting it without mentioning who got the “BIM software” award.
Emre Erdogan
Hello,
I don’t really know well about this award, but it seems everybody getting some kind of reward in similar situations. As in “Autodesk Building Design Suite” got the” Architectural Design Software of the year” title in the mentioned award show. So probably Adesk is now promoting that one instead of “Bim Product” title :).
Djordje
and still, revit is dripping out of every ceiling …
getting the rewards is all well and good, being the gillette, hoover, or frigidaire is the real thing. for the majority, bim is using revit.
Djordje
oh, and still insisting on architects, regretfully the least important and the least paid piece of the construction, not to mention maintenance and management, puzzle … that’s baffling, at least.
selling off the project costing/planning/management system, now happily with BIMble, having a FM BIM solution 20 years ago (was there at the sneak peek) that nobody still knows about … incredible.
the best software made by the best people and minds, the worst marketing.
Phil Allsopp
Djordje…..agree with you. I saw the same myopia ruin one of the earliest and mature BIM products in the early 1980s (BDS AND GDS from Applied Research of Cambridge, UK) when it was sold to McDonnell Douglas Automation. First thing they did was to strip out all of the BIM capabilities (project mgmt,. cost analysis, structural analysts, HVAC analysis) so they could sell an automated drafting system to architects who had no way to afford their Defense Department pricing mentality. GDS had some substantial but largely unsupported BIM capabilities and only a couple of firms in the US exploited them -Leo Daly and Perkins and Will being among the earliest adopters as well as the Uzk’s giant mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey.
McDonnell Douglas totally missed the FM and GIS markets and when Auotocad was released (I beta tested version 0.8 and it was as bad then as the current version), they had no capacity or marketing know how to combat the PC based and cheap 2D drawing system with which Autodesk was flooding the market.
Does ANYONE in Graphisoft Corporate have any strategies up their sleeves for penetrating the upstream market drivers-namely the corporate FM shops whom Autodesk is successfully courting?
Also, is there anyone in Graphisoft Corporate who knows anything about this upstream market? A ton of ArchiCAD users ( in the U.S. and elsewhere) certainly do but I get the strongest sense that Coroorare would rather ignore this valuable experience base and insights and just keep trying to flog ArchiCAD licenses to hosts of small one to five person design shops. Each one of these firms is likely to be cash poor at times and under strong pressure from their developer or corporate clients to tie the line with Revit capabilities.
Is anyone asking these kind of corporate strategy questions at corporate meetings in Budaoest or zin the US?
Phil Allsopp
UK mapping agency, Ordnance Survey…….
Armando
I thought Archicad doesn’t offer a complete BIM Suite since it has no MEP modeling tools. Don’t you have to link in MEP models created in other software? Is this correct? Just remembering a brochure.
Jared Banks
ArchiCAD has an MEP modeler and there are a few structural firms who use ArchiCAD as their main authoring tool (I’ve worked with one). So it can do all those things. Also “complete BIM suite” is an interesting term for discussion for another day.
Phil Allsopp
First my apologies for typos resulting from writing my reply on my iPad on a bus!
I just received a reply to another (unrelated) email of mine from someone who thinks that Revit and AutoCAD are the only games in town. The person lives in southern Europe and works in a corporate FM setting. So much for the the accolades of “best BIM System”……Here’s the text of the message:
Hi Phil,
Thank you for the message. I have had some experience with ArchiCAD but didn’t realize it was used often. Fortunately, I can easily pick up new programs. Thank you for the help, I will look more into ArchiCAD.
…………….
Again, my question remains…. is anyone in Budapest or at Nemetschek AG listening to the market drivers who certainly are not architectural firms?
Phil
Djordje
Yes, Phil, ArchiCAD and ArchiCAD based solutions are so good that they don’t need marketing, it’s so obvious … for you, Jared, and I.
As for Armando’s viewpoint – this is the prevailing perception. Revit has a complete BIM suite, ArchiCAD is only for architects. Shows the lack od information and the effort to know more than what your software supplier or CAD manager feed you.
Revit’s know problems with handling large files and exponential slowing curve necessitate breaking up the models. At the recent local user group, the user presentation included a 10000 sqft villa that had to be broken up, as it was becoming unmanageable. ‘Scuse me? 150+ MB file is a nono. Add to that only recently decent IFC capabilities, and the picture becomes clearer.
Now … did anyone anytime did a comparison of the overtime and coordination costs for “complete BIM suite” where you work in separate models, and coordinate them in another application (usually Navisworks), NOT in the authoring application? How BIM is that? Let’s not mention the required very high end workstations and network accellerators.
Comparison should be done with an openBIM suite, where the file exchange is done via IFC or API, and where each of the authoring applications CAN load the whole model, at least for reference – and you don’t need it for anything else. Without extra hardware costs.
I don’t remember ever seeing such a comparison or an analysis. It’s all about the features, right? Wrong. Nobody cares about the features, people do not know enough to evaluate, and have no intention to do so, as the CAD manager already has the hotline to the supplier, so why bother?
The software field is held by the suppliers, not the users.
Phil Allsopp
Our ArchiCAD files are regularly well in excess of 180MB and we experience no noticeable slowdowns especially running OS X 10.10.1 on an all solid-state iMac. We are still waiting for the serious rewrite of EcoDesigner and EcoDesigner Star. We also need an integrated finite element analysis add-on to simulate the permutations and combinations of different cross laminated timber diaphragms comprising our company’s Interlock system of dry assembly construction. Lastly, we conduct 3D laser scans of neighborhoods and buildings so we need a fast point cloud manipulation and visualization tool within ArchiCAD.
This being said, Graphisoft really needs to beef up its strategy for securing a healthy market share of the BIM market -and NOT just in Europe. Graphisoft also needs to understand that “architects” does not equate to a need to dumb things down. We need more granular analytic capabilities not less.