Bluebeam Software Promotes Digital Project Workflows Through its Faces of Revu Campaign at Autodesk University 2011

Sanjay Gangal recently interviewed Richard Lee, President & CEO of Bluebeam Software at the Autodesk University 2011.

Sanjay: Richard, how has the show been going for you?

Richard: The show has been fantastic. Actually, it has been really busy. So we’ve been very excited to be here. It’s always a good show for us, but this year we have a very large booth and our presence is great. It’s nice to see a lot of our customers visiting us.

Sanjay: Tell us a little bit about Bluebeam software. How long have you been around? Where are you based at? How big are you?

Richard: Our Company is based at Pasadena, California. We’ve been around for about ten years now. We’ve kinda been in this industry for a while. We’re quite large, we have customers in fifty three different countries now. We have about a hundred resellers worldwide. We are opening an office on the east coast. We have an office now in Sweden. It’s actually pretty exciting. I think our customers are excited to have that type of support, and we are excited to be there.

Sanjay: That’s great. Tell us about your products. You have a number of products; tell us the names and also what makes them different.

Richard: Sure. This year we released Extreme. We’ve always had with our Revu product line a Standard and CAD version.

This year we decided, you know what, something for the real power user. So Extreme actually includes OCR, it has forms technology; scripting. It’s really designed for full customization. It’s for that power user who really wants all the power. So we built that and released that this year. We also have our Q sever which has been fantastic in terms of really optimizing enterprise wide conversion, pdf creation, and post processing,

Also this year we’ve released Studio Server. Studio Server is based off our studio technology for real time collaboration. So you can essentially have your own collaboration server behind your own firewall. So that anyone using Revu can collaborate in real time. It’s actually quite nice. It works with a lot of our government customers.

Sanjay: So you had the Revu, and now you have the Extreme, what’s the difference between these two products?

Richard: It’s really based on the feature set. So, our standard product is for everyday office user and what they are using. Our CAD product has the plug-ins into auto-CAD and solid-works. This is really designed for the CAD user, with extra tools and power for them.

The Extreme user has the OCR and forms and the scripting technology. So we kinda divided the products really by different features. Letting the user to decide what they want. We noticed that our users usually segment themselves that way. Q and Studio Sever are really designed for large enterprises.

We find that they are really looking for systems that can work across the enterprise, so that the user doesn’t have to think about it, and everything can be centralized.

Sanjay: Tell us more about the Studio, because I’m not quite clear as to what exactly it does.

Richard: We built in a collaboration technology called Studio within Revu. Within Revu as you are marking up technology, you can invite someone to your session which allows them to mark-up the same pdf at the same time.

If you are doing it at the same time, everything appears in real time, and you can leave the Studio session open. If you leave it open, what happens is that two weeks later you can come back and add mark-ups and then you are going to see it.

So it’s kinda like, if you were to have drawings open in a war room setting, you could go in at any time and add your comments. We replicated that using Revu. Studio Server is then an enterprise solution to host your own sessions. So studio is a cloud based solution that BlueBeam holds. Studio Server is so that you host your own personal cloud if you will.

Sanjay: What about the Q?

Richard: Q is centralized pdf creation and post processing. So you can take any CAD drawing, any document converted to pdf, and then you can add some intelligence to it. If you want to add a stamp, or if you want to add some comments to it, all of that you can do afterwards.

The nice thing is, is that we have a lot of customers looking for that ability; To automate a process, or to tie directly into their document management system so that they can generate a pdf file and then add a stamp to it and so on.

Sanjay: Who have been the primary users of these products? Are these mainly CAD teams? Or have you gone into non-CAD markets also?

Richard: We essentially focus on the architecture, engineering, and construction community. That’s probably about eighty percent of our community. The rest of it is outside that, so we have lawyers, accountants, real estate folks, financial folks, and it is quite exciting to see that grow.

But, our presence really is all about AEC, and construction is actually the fastest growing segment of that. So it’s great, we’ve always loved this industry, and we continue to work in it.

Sanjay: How can people find out more about BlueBeam?

Richard: Just go to our website BlueBeam.com. Or just give us a call. There will be a real person who speaks to you and will tell you what we are all about.

Tags: collaboration, pdf

Categories: Bluebeam, Extreme, Revu, Studio Server

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