Bentley claims new research shows AEC design professionals prefer Bentley BIM solutions over Autodesk Revit. The research took the form of a survey that sought to identify aspects of a BIM solution that would be most appealing to AEC design professionals. Bentley hired
AECbytes editor Lachmi Khemlani, Ph.D. to conduct the survey and prepare the results.
The stated objective of the survey was to identify the most important requirements that AEC professionals would like BIM solutions to fulfill. We see the survey as a new way for Bentley to position its architectural solutions against the increasingly strong Revit; we are aware that some Bentley-based architectural firms have switched to Revit or acquired a significant number of seats in recent months.
The Bentley-commissioned study involved 650 respondents, equally distributed between single-office and multiple-office firms. Of those 650 taking part, 46% identified themselves as architects, 14% as engineers or construction professionals, the remainder identified as in operations. They were asked to rate 12 fundamental BIM approaches and 19 BIM features.
“We had two goals for this survey,” explained Huw Roberts, global marketing director, Bentley Building. “Let’s gain a better understanding of our market while providing a comparative measure of the values placed on the relative strengths of Bentley BIM and Revit.”
The two-part survey first asked respondents to rate a variety of features on a scale of 1 to 5, then to select one of two options as more important (or to respond as neutral on their competing value). Here are some sample items from the survey:
- Full support for producing construction documents so that another drafting application need not be used
- Smart objects, which maintain associativity, connectivity, and relationships with other objects
- Support for construction-related tasks such as quantity take-off estimating and 4D scheduling
- Direct integration with cost estimating application
- Automated setup, management, and coordination, reducing traditional CAD management tasks
- Ability to work on large projects
- Ability to support preliminary conceptual design modeling
- Scalable solution supporting collaboration and distributed work processes versus Single database solution featuring easier setup, organization, and management
- Support for 3D PDF for electronic publishing and distribution versus Support for 3D DWF
Bentley says the results point to a desire for strong capabilities in drawing production; it was the highest ranked feature across all categories of firms and respondents. Other highly rated criteria include enhanced modeling capabilities with smart objects, the ready availability of object libraries so that effort is not wasted in re-creating standard building components, support for distributed work processes, and the ability to work efficiently on large projects.
Bentley says its quantitative analysis of the survey shows that 58% of building professionals prefer the approach and features of Bentley BIM solutions and 38% preferred those of Autodesk’s Revit.
Speaking during a press conference announcing the results, Roberts said Bentley will want to react to each area where Revit performed stronger in the survey and that these results will guide future development, but was not prepared to commit to specifics. “Right now, we hope others will take the survey,” he commented. “Regardless of the result, it can help building professionals structure their thinking while on the path to a decision.”
To that end, Bentley now offers a BIM Wizard—essentially the same survey but now available to all who are interested. It is available online at www.bentley.com/bimwizard. Roberts said the wizard will generate a recommendation of either Revit or Bentley BIM based on a user’s responses.
When we took the survey and answered all questions in as neutral a fashion as possible, the automated results said it was not able to make a solution recommendation. When we took the survey and intentionally tried to skew it in favor of Revit, the results said we strongly favored Bentley BIM. It would take several more iterations of taking the survey from various hypothetical perspectives to independently judge the recommendations, but the survey website only allows one survey per email address.
The raw numbers of the survey conducted in September 2007, and Dr. Khemlani’s analysis are both available at the AECbytes website.
--Laura Lathan and Randall S. Newton