Bricsys Takes A Slice

Bricsys, a founding member of the OpenDesign Alliance and a member of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium, today announced in a press release that they have struck a volume contract with German based Kemper Gmbh for distributing Bricscad V9 along with a sanitary installations software developed by a plug-in developer. “Volume” in this case turns out to be a thousand licenses. And that’s only an initial order, which can be extended to thousands in the coming months.

What is not mentioned in the the press release is that the developer currently offers the solution for AutoCAD. So this Bricsys-Kemper deal is actually taking a slice out of Autodesk’s market share pie chart.

In a comment to an earlier post on this blog titled “New Clone on the Block“, Ralph Grabowski wondered, “It’s all fine to claim compatibility with ARX. I would like to hear of the results of third-party developers porting to DRX and BRX.” I guess a thousand licenses should be a good enough answer.

In that same post I said, “Basically, they [Bricsys] are making it a lot easier for AutoCAD users to dump AutoCAD for Bricscad, especially those who find themselves tied to AutoCAD due to to third party ObjectARX plug-ins.” Looks like Bricsys’ BRX SDK strategy is beginning to pay off.

Bricsys is positioning itself to be different from other IntelliCAD vendors. But it is not the only one. Graebert is working on an ObjectARX source compatible SDK of their own. They are calling it an AutoCAD compatible CAD engine and have code named it “Argon”. And I believe there may be others.

So should Autodesk be worried about this trend? While I am pretty sure that a thousand licenses is a large number for Bricsys, I highly doubt it is a small number for Autodesk.