CEO Covers Vectorworks Partner Network, Vectorworks 2021 and more

Dr. Biplab Sarkar, CEO of Vectorworks, Inc., in an interview with Sanjay Gangal, CEO and president of AECCafe, spoke about the company as well as latest announcements.

Sanjay Gangal: Tell us about Vectorworks:

Dr. Sarkar: Vectorworks is an award-winning design and BIM software provider, serving architecture, landscape architecture and BIM around the world. We have been creating software since 1985, building software with a design focus, and we have around 700,000 users around the world creating, connecting and influencing the next generation of design with Vectorworks, on Mac and Windows, headquartered in Columbia, MD. We have offices in Newbury, England and Vancouver, Canada. We are a part of the Nemetschek Group. We have sister companies like Allplan, Graphisoft, Maxon and other construction software companies.

Sanjay Gangal: How has Covid-19 affected your business?

Dr. Sarkar: It got affected like other businesses, we learned the importance of adaptability. We found new ways to support and connect with customers. We held our first-ever virtual Vectorworks Design Summit last year. One of the advantages was that people from all around the world were able to connect and talk to us during those events. Otherwise we would have had more localized events. The virtual nature helped us a lot. We are having more virtual firm visits, meeting with more customers. The recent Vectorworks Open House on April 21 allowed customers to talk to product experts as well as developers about Vectorworks feature sets, workflows, and the public Roadmap. We published our Vectorworks Roadmap product roadmap last November and are very excited about that. It is a 5-year roadmap.

Sanjay Gangal: Can you describe the Vectorworks Roadmap?

Dr. Sarkar: Here is a brief synopsis—we have three design industry offerings: the building solution, the landscape solution and the entertainment solution. More and more we divide our areas into themes: collaboration, user interface, user experience and core features required to take the product forward. In each of those segments we list a number of features. These are all based on user feedback, as well as our partner feedback. We have partners in different parts of the world giving us feedback from the field. That helped us build up this particular roadmap and we have already done some of this in the one that just came out.

Sanjay Gangal: It’s almost public since you’re sharing it here and opens it up to competition to see where you’re going.

Dr. Sarkar: That’s one of the questions we always get— where are the tools going, what is the path you’re choosing because you have all this competition. So is Vectorworks going to be a BIM product forever or is it going in some other direction? Those are some of the things that will be answered with this roadmap.

Sanjay Gangal: What makes your products differentiated and unique in the marketplace?

Dr. Sarkar: I think it is our design focus, we are in the business of building a software solution for design professionals around the world. We try to make it intuitive, powerful and practical—that is our tagline we use, the best-in-class technology. For example, Parasolid or Maxon rendering engine. These are the core bases of our products. People have the freedom to model anything but at the same time, presenting them with the precision and the artistic flare that they need. It’s got that mixture of the mechanical CAD designer’s paradigm and the artistic flare that you need as an architect. That’s the mixture that kind of separates us from the rest of the pack. Along with that we have the collaborative environment which allows our customers to work with other designers from other disciplines and that’s the main characteristic that separates us from the competition. The other distinction is we provide flexibility of licensing, we have the perpetual option, perpetual maintenance and networking licenses but we also recently embarked upon the paradigm of subscriptions. We have started that all around the world now. People have options according to their licensing needs and functionality of the software.

Sanjay Gangal: Tell us about Service Packs.

Dr. Sarkar: Service Packs allow people to update their Vectorworks software. There’s an update mechanism whenever there’s a new update available that will notify you of the latest Service Pack. Users can click on that, and that will automatically download it into the proper folders, pretty much like what you experience on your phone or iPad. It is a similar experience letting you know the latest version of Vectorworks is available.

Our Service Packs generally have partnership features for every version, and that is the same this year with Vectorworks 2021 Service Pack 3. The number one feature this year was exporting data for Unreal Engine especially on the Mac. It is used to communicate with Twinmotion or Unreal Engine products that can be used for this format. Any products that come out of the Unreal Engine are very important to us. It’s still an import/export mechanism, so you need to export the file from Vectorworks and import it into Twinmotion or Unreal Studio. We are working on a direct link for a future version. You can run Twinmotion and Vectorworks side by side. If you make any changes just to the Vectorworks files, Twinmotion files will automatically change. We have a direct link with Enscape and Lumion, and we will have the direct link with Twinmotion in the coming version in September. We also have Cloud Services with project folder sharing now. This is a way to support our project sharing collaboration feature—one Vectorworks project file shared by multiple users.

Sanjay Gangal: Tell us about the Partner Network.

Dr. Sarkar: The Vectorworks Partner Network is now live; it supports the designer’s vision. We have a wide swath of partner products that work with the Vectorworks platform as we can’t do everything. Our network of partners are collaborators and innovators who help create some of the solutions that give us that extra oomph, allowing users to transform the world with a great design. It’s something we embarked on a couple of years ago and it wasn’t formal. Now it is formal. You have ways to become a partner and there are different levels of partnership. Ultimately it’s the customers who benefit.

Sanjay Gangal: Who are your partners?

Dr. Sarkar: Lumion, Maxon, Solibri, Enscape and others. There are three types of partnership: technology, content, and hardware.

We entered into a partnership with Unreal Engine this year and Solibri with the Nemetschek Group which helps us save time in the BIM workflow.

Our sister company Solibri offers quality assurance of the BIM models. When you generate an IFC file you can send it to Solibri to do a model checking and it will give you a list of problems in the model. Here we have a two-way direct link: the IFC file is automatically transmitted between the two products. Once you send an IFC file to Vectorworks from Solibri then you can run the Model Checker and all the problems are listed in the form of a palette. And you can select a particular issue and sync the issue from Solibri to Vectorworks by selecting corresponding object in Vectorworks. You can make the changes you need to in Vectorworks to keep the Model Checker satisfied. This is a like a two-way process that can go on until all the problems in the Model Checker are solved. IFC files are quite big, and any import/export can take a lot of time. This way, once you select the issue, only objects related to the issue are transmitted, and you’re not waiting for big files to go back and forth for 5 to 10 minutes. You eliminate that completely because you’re only getting the data from smaller chunks of files you’re working on.

Sanjay Gangal: Do you have desktop and cloud versions?

Dr. Sarkar: We don’t have a cloud version of Vectorworks but what we have are Vectorworks Cloud Services. A Vectorworks file can be uploaded to the cloud and then you will be able to visualize it in 3D, mark it up and send it back to Vectorworks. In Cloud Services there is an app called Vectorworks Nomad where you can see all the Vectorworks files that you submitted and mark them up. You can also do a walkthrough of the 3D file, or review of the Vectorworks file. There are a lot of options in the mobile app, Vectorworks Nomad but you cannot say the app is running on the cloud.

For project sharing, you also don’t have to go to Dropbox or Google drive to communicate with other members. You can use the Vectorworks Cloud Services folders. They get free access to around 20 GB with the maintenance program. This is useful for customers with the Service Select program.

Sanjay Gangal: Does Cloud services support locking? So two people are not editing the same design at the same time?

Dr. Sarkar: Yes.

Sanjay Gangal: What is best way to find out more Vectorworks?

People can go to Vectorworks.net, our Planet Vectorworks blog or follow @Vectorworks on social media.

Category: Video Interview

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2021 at 10:13 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.