Konstru to Offer Interoperability Platform to Automate Exchange of BIM Data

An interesting new product, Konstru, is a central interoperability platform that automates the exchange of BIM data between analysis & modeling software tools, due for launch in July. Konstru supports all your favorite and most popular design and analysis tools and allows them to communicate with one another.

The product was created by structural engineers and for structural engineers, in order to make this communication possible between BIM software programs. Konstru is a quick plug-in download that allows you to upload your current projects model to their secure cloud. It’s possible to exchange BIM data across multiple platforms, make necessary revisions, and visually understand everything that changed.

While this is a new interoperability program, Konstru CEO K.P. Reddy said that he began his first BIM-oriented company in 2005. Konstru embraced the challenge of the standards industry that views IFC as the benchmark for all interoperability. “Standards are great but they have a way of holding you back,” said Reddy.

In the world of AEC there have been a few major players in the space, and those players generally encourage users to stay within their design tools and software. For them to push interoperability is a “double-edged sword” according to Reddy, and while they do provide what the market wants in terms of interoperability, if their products are fully interoperable, users may decide to switch design packages.

Konstru can sit in the middle of the design tools and allow designers to use whatever tools they wish. The way popular software programs have used their influence to hold people in place has really caused this to happen. “There were users who loved Archicad but all of a sudden got pushed into using Revit, because it became an ‘industry standard’ for segments of the market such as the GSA,” said Reddy “For owners this caused problems wth lack of interoperability between products, because they are in the business of buying a building, they are not in the technology business.”

According to company materials, structural engineers using Revit, Tekla, ETABS, Grasshopper, Excel, SAP2000, ETABS, RAM or other modeling software, often encounter the painful issue of collaborating with other project stakeholders. When everyone on a team uses a different software, it can be painful to maintain accurate model versions, control user access, compare versions and analyze different models. Konstru was created because, as engineers, they didn’t want to keep building models in different software packages over and over again and continue to get lost in different file versions. Use cases: https://konstru.com/use-case-updates-sharing-comparison/

Konstru has an open API and modern API to allow for people have the flexibility to build their own use cases and develop apps for BIM without much programming language.

KP describes Konstru as a “rosetta stone for all design tools. So instead of having to export from Revit and pull the data into Tekla and work with it in something else, if you’re a Revit user you stay in Revit, or if partners on the design team are in Tekla they don’t have to keep exporting and importing and pushing all these files around.”

Konstru is 100% built in the cloud from the ground up. Unlike a lot of tools that are cloud-based, Konstru is cloud native, built it from the ground up.

Reddy says that there are very few cloud-based offerings that have a free version that is free forever — fully functioning, limiting the number of users, and it scales from there. “We have per user pricing, we also have per project pricing, for people building a project, they like the per project pricing.” For those running larger projects, there is a cost.

We support large models and global teams and multiple software packages. Our biggest challenge is that the large software companies are fairly consolidated. The type of innovation we’re driving is allowing users to choose how they want to use their products.”

Standards groups are part time jobs for all those involved in interoperability, and create a situation that makes it difficult to drive interoperability. Reddy says that they still must align with the various standard groups, but Konstru saves a lot of time and eliminates errors.

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, BIM, building, building design, Cloud, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, Konstru, reality capture, Trimble

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, AECCafe, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, building information modeling, buildingSMART, collaboration, construction, data archiving, file sharing, IFC, site planning, sustainable design

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