Bangalore, India
Recently, GeoSpatial Today, India's leading magazine that focuses on news in the field of applications and innovations in the geospatial sector spoke to Erik de Keyser, CEO of Bricsys. Erik spoke at length about his vision for Bricsys and the Indian CAD market. With permission from the magazine, I take pleasure to post the interview here. Read on.....
Erik de Keyser, CEO, Bricsys
"Get brisk with Bricscad”
CAD software licenses and maintenance costs have been very high. We believe that software costs should be affordable to all kinds of businesses, says Erik de Keyser in an interview to Geospatial Today.
GT: Tell us about Bricsys and Bricscad?
EK: Bricscad is a full-featured .dwg-based CAD platform for design, modelling and drafting from Bricsys NV of Belgium. It is the fastest growing .dwg-based CAD software and is recognised as one that has close to 200 third-party add-ons running on it.
Familiar user-interface, commands, menus, names and procedures and the use of industry standard .dwg format and supporting files like LIN, DXF, PAT, SHX make interoperability between AutoCAD and Bricscad easy. No loss of data, no translations – all native support for each other.
Bricscad V11 is a stable release of Bricscad that performs very well on large .dwg datasets, handles a variety of image formats with geo-referencing options and offers extended curve geometry support. We are at a point today where the feature set of Bricscad compares with the best what any geo-data CAD user could ask for.
This has made us particularly bullish about the prospects of Bricscad as a GIS-CAD data creation and editing platform.
GT: How different is Bricscad from other CAD software?
EK: Bricscad aims to provide users with a familiar CAD user interface. It has been written entirely from scratch with native, original code and comes from a company that defines its own roadmap. It is not an IntelliCAD-based software.
Bricscad is written using OS-neutral code and is available on Windows and Linux. A Mac version is planned for Q4, 2011.
GT: What are your plans to tap the geographic-data CAD user market?
EK: India is a growing economy and a huge user-base of CAD is involved in surveying, GIS base map creation, infrastructure management, utilities etc. Many of the businesses in this sector are small and medium enterprises with modest budgets and operate with competitive margins.
Traditionally, CAD software licenses and maintenance costs have been very high. We believe that software costs should be affordable to all kinds of businesses and see a perfect fit for Bricscad in these segments. The success of Bricscad is also equally credited with the support given by our local partners in extending and enhancing the value of Bricscad with third-party applications.
Our India partner, Bangalore-based Coordinate Systems offers GeoTools for Bricscad, with over 270+ productivity-boosting geo-data specific tools complementary with every license of Bricscad sold.
E-Surveying Solutions, a surveying CAD add-on developer, also based in Bangalore, is yet another company whose products are ported and available on Bricscad.
With local support and technical expertise combined with the availability of over 50+ third-party software for Bricscad, exclusively for Civil/Survey and GIS, we foresee the emergence of a new platform for the geographic-data users in India.
GT: Geospatial users use data from wide variety of sources and work on multiple software. How does Bricscad ensure interoperability and compatibility?
EK: Bricscad supports a wide variety of vector and raster export and import formats in its .dwg environment.
The ability to digitise from satellite imagery (raster data) is critical to geo-data users. Bricscad offers support for all standard geo-referenced image formats as well as GIS-specific formats like ECW files from ERDAS / ERMapper and the MrSID from Lizardtech. It is the only product in its price range that offers this kind of support.
Our partner in India, Coordinate Systems, has developed additional tools within their GeoTools product which makes it possible to work with AutoCAD Map object data using Bricscad. You can now seamlessly create, edit and integrate AutoCAD Map object data, right from your Bricscad environment.
Yet another plug-in from our partner, SYCODE, also based in India, allows ESRI SHP files to be imported into Bricscad.
GT: The Indian CAD market for Bricscad is yet to be tapped. What are your long-term goals?
EK: The long-term goal is to ensure that Bricscad finds a place amongst the geo-data users as a solid, reliable GIS-CAD data creation and editing platform. We would like to invite more vendors from India with geo-data-based CAD applications to port their applications on Bricscad.
GT: Can you tell us more about the Bricsys ecosystem?
EK: Today users can login on any of the 56 localised Bricsys websites and have a full range of services at hand, including, detailed information about all available applications, forums, online support with internal notification systems etc. We provide the best user experience in the market. This is all managed with our powerful online CRM system behind it.
These services are now free of charge and available for all third-party application developers. They can provide the best of breed of online support to their customers without investing in expensive infrastructure and software. But even more important is the effect on the user side. The user is only interested in a solution that works. That solution is made up by the platform – Bricscad – and the application. Our ecosystem brings together the user, the application developer and the Bricsys team, to smoothly communicate and work together online for providing transparently, again the best possible user experience. This is in the interest of all parties involved.
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