Plex-Earth, a platform for AutoCAD that brings many aerial and satellite imagery providers under a single umbrella, announced it has expanded its offering to BricsCAD to inform smart engineering with recent, historical, high-quality imagery and terrain data.
- Bricsys was acquired by Hexagon in October 2018. Bricsys’ CAD platform, BricsCAD, is a powerful.dwg-based CAD application offering familiar commands and user interface elements.
- 2 days ago Plex-Earth, a platform for AutoCAD that brings many aerial and satellite imagery providers under a single umbrella, announced it has expanded its offering to BricsCAD to inform smart engineering with recent, historical, high-quality imagery and terrain data. By leveraging the power of premium imagery from providers like Maxar, Airbus, Nearmap, Hexagon or Google Maps within BricsCAD.
- BricsCAD is the familiar design platform for all your needs; 2D drafting, 3D modeling, Mechanical design and BIM. Building Information Modeling Product Design & Manufacturing A faster and smarter way to create 2D Capture your ideas with BricsCAD BIM Get the best tools to support the changing or 3D CAD designs with a familiar CAD and move.
By leveraging the power of premium imagery from providers like Maxar, Airbus, Nearmap, Hexagon or Google Maps within BricsCAD and visualizing designs into Google Earth, engineers understand project site conditions early on, speed up processes and avoid rework.
Leica CloudWorx for BricsCAD provides users with a route to begin modelling or creating linework from point clouds stored in Leica Cyclone or Leica JetStream, directly within BricsCAD. CloudWorx for BricsCAD returns major time savings for firms of any size, allowing users to work smarter, not harder, to achieve professional level results.
The ability to rapidly and easily obtain quality real-world data remotely with Plex-Earth is of utmost importance especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic, where site visits and ground-based surveys are limited or not possible.
Instead of using free imagery sources that are often outdated and unsuitable for commercial engineering use, designers can make full use of Airbus’ and Maxar’s vast historical datasets or Nearmap’s and Hexagon’s ultra-high resolution imagery to get better precision and track the progress of their projects.
“Ten years ago, being a civil engineer myself, I got a bitter taste of the true cost of rework, leading me to develop a tool that would give me a bird’s eye view of the jobsite and ultimately make me a better engineer. Plex-Earth was born back in 2010 out of this necessity and I am truly excited that we have now expanded our unique offering to BricsCAD and businesses of any size through a variety of affordable Plex-Earth subscriptions. New content providers will constantly be added and we will soon also include on-demand drone flights in the mix,” said Lambros Kaliakatsos, Plexscape founder and CEO.
With Plex-Earth’s unique business model, individual engineers, small or large businesses can all have access to premium content from within their preferred CAD environment, for a flat subscription fee and at no extra cost without the need to seek individual companies and commit to large contracts. A fully functional free trial of Plex-Earth is available at https://plexearth.com/free-trial.
News item from Plexscape
A day after the BricsCAD conference in London, it still dizzies. There are loads of radical innovations and improvements to mention. Then there is the news that Bricsys has been taken over by Hexagon ppm. What are the consequences?
Bricsys is a model of our rapidly changing world. A little over a year ago we wrote a widely read article entitled “AutoCAD? Or just BricsCAD?” That article now feels like being outdated and no longer relevant. BricsCAD has technologically passed that station at a high speed. Where is BricsCAD now?
- Alternative for Revit when it comes to BIM
- Alternative for SolidWorks and Inventor when it comes to mechanical engineering
- Alternative for AutoCAD
What Is Bricscad
This makes it immediately clear that you can do everything in one program with one storage format (DWG). This works better, faster and with the efficiency of one environment. It also means a significant cost saving on education and licenses. Finally, this guarantees the quality and compatibility of valuable CAD files. These are not exactly the standard arguments for buying a software package and it is good to think about it.
Obviously, the acquisition by Hexagon ppm raises questions. Hexagon ppm is very close to the industry with specialist products that fill niches. From this point of departure, it is conceivable that BricsCAD as a CAD platform forms a valuable basis for building many solutions. In fact, people are already working on that. For example, the CADWorx Plant Design Suite was made suitable for BricsCAD last year. Hexagon ppm is therefore no longer dependent on Autodesk and it also works faster and more stable.
Then there is a concern what Hexagon ppm does to the Bricsys team. This team functions under the enthusiastic founder Erik de Keyser as a well-oiled entity. The emphasis here is on the team in Ghent for the general features of the whole and the team in Novosibirsk for the translation of difficult wishes into mathematical approaches and ultimately the code. It is a fragile whole with extremely good performances. It can be assumed that Hexagon understands what “do not change a winning team” means.
What does it all mean for market share? BricsCAD is a small player that has shown significant growth every year. However, it is realistic to say that a substantial market share would take many years to come. Hexagon ppm offers an environment to significantly shorten that path. That leaves no room for short-sighted money-rake constructions for shareholders as Autodesk uses with mandatory subscriptions. In order to achieve this rapid growth, it is also not obvious that prices will rise sharply.
Bricscad For Mac
PS After writing this, an interview with Erik de Keyser and Rick Allen was published and more or less confirms this vision. The interview can be found here.