Hong Kong
Following the successful launch of V16 at the Bricsys International conference in Munich last month, Bricsys is now going places with the V16 roadshows & partner connect meets in different regions. Last week, it was Osaka and Tokyo in Japan. Yesterday, on 17th November, the Asia Partners conference took place in Hong Kong for the first time and I was there to attend.
CEO Mr. Erik de Keyser & COO Mr. Mark Van den Bergh addressed the CAD industry participants in the region with the day-long presentations.
We were there at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kowloon with a select group of about 25 people - partners from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia & Indonesia. There were both existing partners and new ones who came to hear about BricsCAD for the first time. Earlier, I was talking to Maurice Kong, Bricsys Country manager for Hong Kong & China and he told me the Asia conference is an opportunity for Bricsys partners from South East Asia to meet Bricsys management face to face.
The audience listening to Bricsys presentations
Session 1: CEO Erik de Keyser started off the morning session by introducing the company to the audience, many of whom are here for the first time. Unlike most other CAD vendor CEOs we have seen and heard, he stressed equal importance on 2d as well as 3d, and the potential and opportunity that millions of .dwg users and billions of .dwg data offers. "Being a clone was never a choice for us. We have reached this point charting our own road-map, based on what users require." said Erik de Keyser
Session 2: Next up was Mark Van Den Bergh, COO of Bricsys telling us BricsCAD V16. He promised shorter lead times before localized version (simplified & Traditional Chinese) hit the South East Asian market. So, users in Chinese markets can expect to use BricsCAD in their language faster than ever.
Speaking of freedom of choice, which is central to the Bricsys message of REAL choice, Mark stressed the ability of being able to use a single license of BricsCAD on Wndows, Mac and Linux interchangeably as something that has generated significant interest in countries like Indonesia.
Talking about Communicator, Mark said more and more 3d CAD users are in Japan are looking at using Communicator as a bridge to import their 3D model geometry from proprietary and product-specific formats.
Bricsys sees great potential for Sheet Metal and 3D modeling, especially in countries like Japan, Korea & Taiwan. "Bricsys provides that game-changing software for sheet metal and modeling" said Mark Van den Bergh in his address.
After the morning tea break, Mark continues the presentation with a detailed session on Sheet Metal, which is one of the major highlights of V16. Clearly, Sheet Metal dominates the presentations today and it is all the more relevant and important in the East Asian region which is home to much of the world's production facilities.
Session 3, just before lunch: Erik is back on the floor with his passionate message about BricsCAD BIM. "We are here to play a dominant role, not a secondary one." began Erik, setting the tone for this presentation. "We want to do smart things with .dwg drawing an analogy to the success of the Apple devices. Steve Jobs took UNIX as the base, added a smart interface, built an eco-system around it and charted a huge success story. We want to do the same with the .dwg platform, extending its usefulness to BIM".
"We know we need a simplified UI for BIM" says Erik de Keyser and stressed the need for eliminating dialog boxes & settings in software before you can get a thing done.
Bricsys wants to stay focused on delivering solutions that are built on open, industry-standard formats. Like the .dwg, Bricsys wants to leverage on the industry-standard exchange format for BIM data, namely IFC as the basis of much of its BIM data representation and exchange.
Post lunch, Mark is giving us an insight of the internals of Bricsys as a company and how the sales & support mechanism works. The day ends with a visit to the German bier pub followed by a dinner at the bay-side overlooking Hong Kong island.
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