This is the overriding principle – just because it’s worked before, doesn’t mean it’s always going to be right. In his keynote speech, Erik de Keyser detailed the principles that drives his decision-making within Bricsys: It’s also important to keep the product development running – Hexagon’s choice of BricsCAD as a CADWorx platform differentiates Bricsys in the AutoCAD-workalike market, but the increasingly crowded BIM market needs a strong product development drive. This is important, since his vision for the product and experience of the market that Bricsys targets will be crucial over the coming months. As I mentioned earlier, there may be a temptation for Hexagon to concentrate on the CADWorx user base for quick wins what Bricsys needs is a focus on Construction of Buildings.Įrik de Keyser has stated his intention to remain with the company. Importantly, this must encompass the whole range of customers that Bricsys target, even though that isn’t necessarily in Hexagon’s comfort zone.
From a Bricsys point of view, it needs a greatly enhanced level of sales and marketing support. How this acquisition is managed is crucial to the success or otherwise. Also, it’s not just the leading BIM players like Autodesk and Bentley to contend with, but companies like Nemetschek and the local heroes in the DWG space, like ZWCAD and IntelliCAD-based products. The challenge will be to get market share outside of the European Bricsys heartland. They believe that by giving users a compelling reason to switch, making it easy to do so and offering a less expensive option, a good proportion of the 84% will be persuaded to move to Bricsys BIM. How will they get to 25% BIM market share? They intend to target the reported 84% of AEC users that have no BIM solution yet. When pressed for what ‘substantial’ means, they mentioned a figure of 25%. According to the press briefing from Erik de Keyser and Rick Allen, they want to have “substantial market share within 2-3 years”. Hexagon and Bricsys have ambitious goals for this tie-up. Now that it has control over BricsCAD, it can offer perpetual licensing to reassure customers their data will be supported for the long term The ambition
Not having access to the design data would be a disaster, so dependency on third-party software was a risk. Some CADWorx-designed plant may be operational for 40 years.
Indeed, simply migrating the CADWorx base from AutoCAD to BricsCAD may well justify the acquisition on its own.įor Hexagon, the ability to offer customers a perpetual license was crucial. The ability to challenge Autodesk – the main Bricsys competitor in its primary AEC market – is greatly enhanced by being part of a larger organisation.įrom Hexagon’s point of view, the acquisition makes sense just to secure access to platform technology for its CADWorx line. This investment has resulted in some impressive technical developments, but the lack of focus on sales and marketing has meant that Bricsys is not in a position to leverage the new technology to grow significantly.Īlso, the acquisition by such a big player immediately removes some of the sales objections – particularly that of longevity As part of Hexagon, Bricsys is not going away. Over the last few years, Bricsys has invested a lot of its resources into R&D – around 46%. Figure 1 – Opening the Bricsys 2018 event The acquisition There is no doubt that over the next few years, more potential customers will have heard of BricsCAD than ever have before. The acquisition by Hexagon pairs the Bricsys BIM vision with Hexagon’s much larger sales and marketing resources. There were plenty of time-saving features too, including leveraging Artificial Intelligence to identify similar features to copy detailed designs onto.Īt a purely product level, the developments are enough to make leading AEC vendors sit up and take notice.īut the big announcement at Bricsys 2018 has the potential to be even more disruptive to the AEC market. The ability to produce a conceptual design, import it directly into BricsCAD for detailed design and then ‘BIMIFY’ it to produce a full-blown BIM model should be simple enough to convince many of the BIM sceptics. Bricsys has a really good story to tell about its BIM solutions and its vision of a workflow based around the.