Reporting on the action at Siemens Realize Live 2025, plus Arcol launches its web-based BIM platform.
This is Engineering Paper, and here’s the latest design and simulation software news.
This week I’m in Detroit for Realize Live Americas 2025, Siemens’ annual user conference. Siemens Digital Industries Software CEO Tony Hemmelgarn gave the opening keynote yesterday to more than 2,500 attendees at the Huntington Place Convention Center. He kicked off the conference with that famous Heraclitus quote—“No man steps in the same river twice”—before expounding on the Greek philosopher’s lesser known views on digital transformation and the Xcelerator portfolio.
Hemmelgarn’s keynote gave a high level tour of Siemens’ products and plans. He pointed out AI copilots in Teamcenter and NX CAM, discussed immersive engineering with Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer, gave some love to recent acquisition Altair and acquisition-in-progress Dotmatics, and showed off deluxe customers including Rolls Royce.
Today’s keynote, headlined by Siemens executive vice president of PLM products Joe Bohman, continued that tour. Bohman talked about BOMs (a favorite subject of his), design space exploration with Simcenter HEEDS, electrical design with Siemens Capital, requirements management with Polarion and more. He also announced that Siemens is developing an “industrial foundation model” to train AI in the language of engineering and manufacturing, but we didn’t get many details on that.
Bohman previewed a couple interesting upcoming features for Xcelerator: one, a new personalized home screen for all users to simplify onboarding, and two, embedded AI agents to which users can assign a task at the click of a button. Oh, and he introduced something called Siemens Designcenter, which as far as I can tell is just a new way of referring to Solid Edge and NX.
One more NX goodie: in the NX CAD keynote by Bob Haubrock, senior vice president of product engineering software, we learned that the upcoming 2506 release will allow multiple NX users to work on the same part or assembly at the same time, with live updates between them à la Google Docs.
More to come as I hunt down details in Detroit. If you’re at the show and want to say hi, you can find me by the coffee (or send me an email at malba@wtwhmedia.com).
Arcol launches “Figma for BIM”
Another cloud competitor has entered the building information modeling (BIM) arena. Arcol, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has launched its web-based platform for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC).
Arcol wants to “bring the magic back to building design,” according to Paul O’Carroll, founder and CEO, in the company’s announcement.
By magic, O’Carroll means an intuitive, playful interface and a web-first workflow that averts versions, foregoes files, and eliminates emails and exports. O’Carroll wants Arcol to be the Figma for BIM (and Figma CEO Dylan Field happens to be an Arcol investor, so the inspiration runs both ways).
So what can it do? Arcol offers real-time collaboration (supporting multiple users and commenting), geometric modeling tools (with familiar sketch and extrude operations), automatic data calculations (live updates of square footage, unit counts, parking, costs, etc.), and a presentation workspace called Boards that synchs with everything else.
Arcol’s data can be exported in the expected ways—STL, CSV, JPG—but there’s also a beta to export models to Autodesk Revit through an add-in. A company spokesperson told me that Arcol will soon support additional BIM platforms as well.
At the moment, Arcol is a conceptual design platform. But the startup plans to go much further in the AEC workflow. Its roadmap includes schematic design, design development and eventually construction documentation.
Arcol is now generally available following a preview release for select firms. The platform starts at $100 per user per month, though enterprise pricing is also available.
So… anyone else feeling déjà vu?
Everything about Arcol reminds me of Motif, another web-based BIM platform that launched in March. Both platforms are taking aim at what they see as the outdated BIM goliath (cough, Revit). Both are explicitly taking cues from Figma and similar web-based tools. Both are coming out of the gate with a focus on conceptual design and real-time collaboration. Both have a synchronized presentation workspace (Motif’s is called Frames). Both have an add-on to send data directly to Revit (though Motif’s is bidirectional, while Arcol’s appears to be one-way). Both are planning more BIM add-ons soon (Motif currently supports Rhino as well as Revit).
And, most interestingly, both have Amar Hanspal, former co-CEO of Autodesk. He was an early investor in Arcol and is now the CEO of Motif. What’s that story, I wonder?
I asked O’Carroll about Hanspal over email, and I’ll quote his deft reply in full:
“Amar was an early angel investor in Arcol and later started Motif, which was unexpected. He is no longer involved in Arcol. But Motif’s entry into the space is just further proof that the industry is really hungry for innovation — it validates our market opportunity. We are confident we are delivering the best experience for today’s designers, and we’ll keep raising the bar for building design. Others will have to answer for themselves.”
Quick hits
- IMSI Design has released TurboCAD 2025, claiming more than 70 updates to the latest version of the CAD software. Those updates include performance boosts, interface improvements, and “AI-driven tools to enhance rendering workflows, provide design insights, and facilitate part creation” in the form of the optional TurboCAD Copilot Professional plug-in.
- 3D software developer CoreTechnologie has updated its 3D_Kernel_IO SDK for CAD conversion. The SDK now supports the latest formats for Catia V5, Solidworks, NX, Creo and more.
- Siemens Digital Industries Software announced two new offerings of its PCB design software, Xpedition, to cater to small and medium businesses. PADS Pro Essentials is a basic version of the software for $999/year and Xpedition Standard is for intermediate users at $2,999/year. Based on the clashing names, it seems Siemens is doing a bit of portfolio spring cleaning. Siemens notes on the Xpedition landing page that “PADS Standard, PADS Standard Plus, PADS Professional and PADS Professional Premium are still current products in our portfolio,” and that users can contact the company for additional seats.
One last link
CIMdata’s Peter Bilello, an Engineering.com contributor and fellow Realize Live attendee (hi Peter!), with In the rush to digital transformation, it might be time for a rethink.
Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.
