Interviewing the Integrators

Four companies who work with Bluebeam to take the AEC industry to new heights

At this year’s Bluebeam eXtreme Conference, StrXur spoke with representatives from some of the software companies that had booths in the Interactive Zone. Among the Bluebeam integration partners present were Procore, Fieldlens, Egnyte and InEight, all leaders in the field of AEC software.

Doug Chambers

Founder, Fieldlens

Fieldlens provides management tools for the construction industry.

“Fieldlens is a strong proponent of ‘best of breed’ and we try to stay very focused on solving the construction industry’s communication problem; therefore it is imperative that we make it easy for Fieldlens to integrate with other software that is focused on other workflows for the industry. Over the past few years many of our customers were already Bluebeam customers and they pushed us hard to build an integration between the products. Revu has completely digitized the ‘plan room’ while we’ve focused on modernizing and consolidating field-based communication of issues, observations, status updates, etc.—this makes us ideal partners. The two solutions together handle the bulk of the challenges that field-based teams encounter. We get daily feedback about integrations, including Blubeam-specific feedback. Number one piece of feedback is always that we have to continue to work to reduce ‘steps’ between the products. ‘One Click’ or ‘No Clicks’ should always be the goal.”

‘Revu has completely digitized the ‘plan room’ while we’ve focused on modernizing and consolidating field-based communication of issues, observations, status updates, etc.—this makes us ideal partners.

Ronen Vengosh

VP of Business Development at Egnyte

Egnyte provides software for enterprise file synchronization and sharing.

“One of the cool things about Egnyte is our hybrid architecture, which means that while we manage content in the cloud, we also enable our customers to sync content to their premises. In the case of the AEC industry, this often means servers that are deployed in construction site trailers. Rather than waiting for massive drawings to upload and download to and from the cloud on what may be a narrow band connection, customers are able to access all their content in the field at high speed, just as if they were working at headquarters. The way in which many of them choose to access that content is via services such as Bluebeam. While our systems work well together through WebDAV, we wanted to enhance and expand our integration. For that reason we’ve been working with the Bluebeam team, and each of us built part of the integration that we announced a few months ago. We now have native integrations with both Revu and Studio Prime and our mutual customers are very excited about them. Egnyte’s ecosystem is the glue which enhances the value of our content layer. We manage the content and make it accessible, we retain a unified, single source of truth, but we make that content available to the broad universe of applications our customers want to use their content with.”

‘We manage the content and make it accessible, we retain a unified, single source of truth, but we make that content available to the broad universe of applications our customers want to use their content with.

Mike Boyle

Product Owner, InEight

InEight connects owners, operators and contractors to people, information and projects.

“InEight noticed there was a synergy that could be made by connecting the 2D world to the world of 3D modeling. In this instance, the whole is greater than the sum of these 2 parts. You are able to produce better outcomes when you connect these two worlds. Integrating with Bluebeam to bring this innovation to life was a natural choice. With our integration with Bluebeam, engineers, contractors and owners can easily connect every aspect of the project to the 3D model in a common data environment, while still providing an easy way to transition back to viewing the 2D plans. This allows the engineer to more easily communicate certain intents to the contractor and fulfill their contracts, and also giving the contractor the ability to add information such as who did what and when was it done. Then, all this data gets handed over to the owner, who can utilize it for asset management. We’ve found digital standards and data openness to be a very welcome approach with our customers. The fact that we do connect to other systems allows customers to use what they need to get the job done.  By normalizing data across your systems, we can account for various levels of data quality and enable cross-project comparisons.”

‘In this instance, the whole is greater than the sum of these 2 parts. You are able to produce better outcomes when you connect these two worlds.

Matt Baum

Product Manager at Procore

Procore designs solutions to help streamline complex processes, create frictionless business operations, and manage the entire lifecycle of construction.

“At Procore, we’re really trying to build a complete construction management software platform. To do that, we really believe that means not only solving the most important problems for our customers, but giving our customers the freedom to use the solutions that they love, which improve their process. The push for this integration really came from our users. Our customers and their collaborators love using Bluebeam, and they were really pushing us to make it easier for them to use Bluebeam with Procore. Moving documents between the two systems was tedious and inefficient, causing a lot of pain for our users. At the highest level I think what makes Procore and Bluebeam ideal integration partners is that both of us really value customer input and work to deliver solutions that solve real problems for our users.  Solving that pain and making users more efficient was the primary driver for this integration. The value is in delivering on our message that we listen to our customers and want to work with them to build a platform that gives them various options for solving problems and improving business processes. Having our customers excited about our partnership with Bluebeam and getting more value out of Procore at the same time makes for a positive impact on our relationship with customers and their collaborators.”

‘At the highest level I think what makes Procore and Bluebeam ideal integration partners is that both of us really value customer input and work to deliver solutions that solve real problems for our users.