Bill – Boston, MA

A. “Well there are a few things to do there. First of all it’s not in the interest of an owner to require information in any locked specific vendor’s format. Bentley would not encourage an owner or builder to require a Bentley specific BIM model.

The best approach and what has been recommended by the National BIM Standard, the G.S.A. current A.I.A. and other organizations is to require an industry neutral format such as IFCs. And that is a good idea, because Bentley, Autodesk, Graphisoft and others all support IFCs and the neutral exchange that is provided.

So the recommendation for you, to advise your client of that opinion and suggest that they follow the national standard and go with the IFC as a neutral file format standard which all of the vendors can support.”

Q. “I’m a long Revit user along with the other person in the room here and fairly new to Bentley, could you sum up in 2 or 3 key phrases what you believe the main differences are given they are both BIM applications? Are there some things you would point out that are the key differences between the two?”

Bob -

A. “Well yes, and perhaps the survey highlights that (click here to view measured approaches slide). The main difference between the two is that Revit puts everything in to one single database that has limit on the complexity, scale and the amount of participants that can interact with that at any given time.

In fact, most Revit users find limitations in performance and collaboration somewhere around 100,000 square foot model, around mid development design detail and somewhere around a team of 4 to 5 people. They also find a lot of issues in terms of connecting that information to other systems that are not in Revit. Those are things that we are very good at. Bentley’s BIM solutions are very good at high complexity, large scale, complete detail, and connecting to other systems. That’s probably the first and largest difference.

I think the other difference is in our solution the integration between all of the disciplines and integration to other systems such as analysis. Whether that discipline specific analysis (such as structural loads, or electrical loads, or lighting, or air and other mechanicals) or general analysis such as environmental and performance (such as eco-tech and other solutions on the market), we have far more connectivity to those kinds of systems that the proprietary connections that are built through the Revit environment.

Then of course, our solution includes the full set of tools from drafting to modeling to rendering, to animation, and so forth, all in one user interface rather then having to take information to other systems like Autocad®, Microstation®, or 3Dstudio®, and so forth.

So those are probably the 3 biggest ones but there are a whole lot of other capabilities we would be happy to show you. ”

Q. “We’ve been a Bentley operation for a number of years. I think the results of this survey corroborated our previous views and the comparative abilities of these two tools are clear to us, so it was good to see that the views we were having were shared by others, so it sort of bolstered our own attitudes about the way we were thinking about these two things.

My real question is what does Bentley plan to do with this information? The fact that its capabilities might be superior in a lot of regards might not be enough. I’m really curious what you plan to do to use this information to grow its user base because a large user base is an independent benefit to any superior capabilities, it’s a separate benefit on its own, and I’m curious how this will factor into a future marketing effort to raise the presence of it in the industry.”

David – New York, NY

A. “Absolutely we are going to use this information along with a whole bunch of other sources of information in a few different ways.

First of all in the BIM era, if you want to call it that, it is still in the early days and while we and Autodesk both seeing great success with our BIM tools, and perhaps communicating that success differently and so forth, it is still in both approaches plenty of room for growth and adoption for everyone. I think the one thing that the survey results point out, we look forward to sharing with as many people we can, these approaches are important and the people have these views on them. It will also will inform us on those areas that were seen as important to people that were seen as strengths of Revit. Clearly those are areas for us to focus on and continue to enhance.

One of the things I’m not really going to take much time today on but we will be sharing soon is we have some really exciting developments coming in our BIM solutions in conjunction with our Athens release. If you had attended or saw any information from our Be Conference this year, some previews of that in terms of new display capabilities, new modeling interface, new user interface, new technology such as GenerativeComponents and others that are being folded in and providing some great enhancements that we will be sharing with everybody soon.

I’m glad to hear this backs up and confirms the thinking and discoveries you found in your practice. We are going to do everything we can to make sure as many people know that as possible and that our products continue to get promoted and adopted at the good pace they are right now.

Q. ” This is very timely for me. I was an Intergraph user and Bentley user in the early 80′s and moved on to AutoCAD as a result of plant request and most recently Revit. We have just made a decision based on my experiences of the Bentley product as being a very superior product to AutoCAD, and for those who, I’m sure we have converted designs here. I’m glad to see that the results that you have here, you have presented, because this is my first meeting, and this week we were having a discussion on going back into the Bentley, and looking at BIM as compared to Revit.
Now the question I have and one of the things that we find with the Revit software is yes, you can design beautiful things, though what restricted, but when you have to present that information on paper, not just for the client but for the builder, there is some difficulty in transporting it to that level.
Tell me, what does BIM do in terms of that. How easy is that to port?

Ralph – Toronto,ONT

A. “Well I think that is a good question.
First of all the first principle I would recommend to anybody is to look at both solutions, look at their strengths, and evaluate what is important to you. You should look at what Revit does well, what it doesn’t as well as what Bentley does.
Clearly one of the common themes we hear from the many Revit customers that are coming to us looking for our BIM solutions are in the areas of the scale and complexity, in the areas of the complete work process, (included in that is the ability to complete drawings and documentation sets as you are describing) as well as the ability to continue the work through the whole project cycle. An awful lot of Revit use seems to sort of stop at the end of schematic design which defeats the purpose of a BIM approach.

But, what I think that really comes down to is evaluating the solution in practice in real scale and seeing real examples rather than show room experience.
Clearly I think the best for you is to get a real answer for your own personal satisfaction is to see it in action and we would love to show that to you.”

Q. “I heard you mention echo tech, are you fully compatible with ECOTECH now?”

Janice –

A. ” I’m not sure of the details what fully compatible means, I know that many of our users are taking our BIM models and information in and out of ECOTECH and we have an information exchange with them. I’d have to refer you to one of our technical folks to walk through the details of that with you.”

Q. “I’m and architect and my question on the Bentley (solutions) are does it have a mechanical and structural component, and if so, how does that work in via Revit if our engineers are using it?”

Jack –

A. ” That’s a good question. We have Architectural, Structural, Mechanical, Electrical. Bentley is the largest provider of structural software in the world and our Structural BIM is extremely strong by itself or with RAM and STAAD structural design and analysis solutions, and even in the detailing and fabrication world with ProSteel.

The mechanical and electrical are similarly strong have similar connections to analysis.

There are 2 ways that could be important to you, one is you can obviously use our solutions and the work well with each other and they all work well through file exchange with other solutions including Revit. You can take any of our models out to IFC or DWG files, or any of the neutral formats and use that with Revit.
We can read ADT files for example if you are using ADT models or your engineers are, that’s fine.

If your engineers are using other solutions and you want to bring them in with Bentley Architecture, you can do that the same way and there are many examples of mixing and matching. I think that is really important because that’s the real world and always will be. Regardless of which solution you choose for your work, you are going to be on projects where others on the team are using the other solution or another solution and you need to make sure they work well together.

Bentley, of course, believes that and has believed that to be fundamental for years and will always continue to support that kind of interchange.”

Q. ” Most of our engineers use Autodesk products and we are starting on our first real BIM project where both HAVC plumbing and electrical are both going to be incorporated, but they are using AutoCAD HAVC, What is the compatibility with that?”

Julie – Columbus, OH

A. ” That is a real common thing, if they (the engineers) are using an AutoCAD HAVC solution, they are going to be outputting a DWG file models, and the Bentley BIM solutions can read and display those, make drawings of those, do interference detection and all of that, drawing and geometry and visualization extremely well.

What will be a little bit questionable depending on which particular solution they are using is how much of the intelligence comes across, and we would have to look at that specific solution with you to answer in a better way.

That exact same issue would be true with them going to any other solution whether that is another AutoCad based solution, or Revit, or some other vendor’s solution. For the most part, that kind of exchange, the geometry, drawings, the presentation of the information, moves around well and quite easily but the intelligence is what you need to look at in more detail on a case by case basis. We would be happy to look at that with you.”

Q. ” So if we send them a copy of our model, and they put things in it, when we get it back, it would probably loose some of the intelligence from the original model we made?”

A. “Again, that depends on exactly what they are doing. When we save information in a DWG format we can send a lot of the intelligence in a format that AutoCAD won’t break, so when it comes back we keep that intelligence.

What I was more referring to was if they make intelligence in their AutoCAD based system, depending on what system it is and how they are doing it we may or may not be able to read that information. One of our technical folks will have to look at that with you.”

Q. ” In that case, the Bentley products would be having more focus on the IFC rather than the national CAD standard? When you install the package, will IFC be the standard?”

A. “One of the great quotes is “the good thing about standards is there are so many”, and that is very true here in BIM as well.

In a BIM modeling process, your going to have standards for; what information you use, how you share it, what things look like, what your office standards are, and so forth.

Obviously there are things like your CAD standards and things in terms of your presentation and information sharing. Then there are things like technical file format standards like DWG files or DGN files, or IFC files if you will.

If you make a model in Bentley Architecture and send it out as and IFC model, Bentley Architecture puts the information in the IFC model in IFC format. You could have been working in the US national CAD Standard in Bentley Architecture, and those two are not mutually exclusive. One is a file format standard (IFC) and the other is an information labeling format (NCS). So you can do both.
In the engineering disciplines you can for example use Bentley Structural and bring in structural engineering codes as a standard.”

Q. “What is the out look or experience of incorporating the civil solutions into the BIM model.”

Troy – Nashville, TN

A. “In the Bentley world, all of Bentleys solutions are integrated with each other. Bringing in Bentley’s civil solutions for land design, infrastructure design, mapping, terrain modeling, even our process plant solutions and everything we make, can work with our BIM solution.

Doing road design and land fill can be highly integrated with the BIM and that information can be shared with the architects and engineers working in the building as well.”