- Finally a BIG story to report on.
- This is a tremendous boost to the Pointools technology and business.
- In the end this will be all about integration – how much and how fast.
Finally, some really big news to report. Things have been quiet from the major vendors for some time, but this announcement has the potential to have a significant impact on on the 3D infrastructure marketplace. Interesting – a quick check of both companies’ websites did not find a mention of the announcement. Looks like Spar Point Research was one of the first to break the news. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I am currently doing some consulting work for Spar.)
CEO Greg Bentley, a strong proponent of laser scanning technology made the announcement yesterday. It is certainly a major validation of the small, Pointools start-up’s technology, and it could not happen to a better group. I have been in a situation where a major player licensed the technology of a start-up. This can have major growth implications given the effort that went into evaluating the software.
Bentley has licensed the technology for all of their products, not just Microstation. In fact the first planned release is with the ProjectWise collaboration system. This will make it much easier to manage access to the data – not a small issue in the large organizations where Bentley is a major player. Look for this in the first half of 2010.
But in the end this will be all about integration. High speed performance was noted as being one of the major reasons for selecting Pointools, but the opportunity for Bentley is to truly integrate support for point clouds into the Microstation platform. They would seem to have an advantage over Autodesk in that they only have one CAD platform to worry about.
It will be interesting to see how the other major players respond. Autodesk announced their licensing of the Ambercore point cloud engine in July 2008, but have yet to deliver a product.
Stay tuned, and let me know how you see it. More on this to come.
HI Gene, thank you for your write up. The announcement is now on both Pointools and Bentley’s home pages.
I’m confident that Bentley users will be delighted with the workflow, performance and the release road-map for point clouds in Microstation.