Shape the era of connection: The Evolution of the Designer'sBIM Cloud Workspace

JEROEN PAT: Good morning, everybody. Welcome for this early session about a dream that we had as TBI to have a new way of working with each other. We will take you through that. If there are some questions, please raise your hand then we can answer them. But first, before I'm going to introduce myself, I formally want to introduce my colleagues. James, you can maybe say who you are.

JAMES JACKSON: Hey, good morning everyone. My name is James Jackson. I'm a solutions specialist at Microsoft. So I've been partnering with these guys for quite some time on this innovative project.

JAMES HIU: Hi, my name is James Hiu.

AUDIENCE: The mic's not on.

JEROEN PAT: OK. When you're setting it up. Thanks.

JAMES HIU: Hello?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JAMES HIU: Hi, my name is James Hiu. I'm from Citrix Systems. I'm a senior technology architect helping out on this project.

MARK SLEEGERS: Hello, my name is Mark Sleegers. I'm from Autodesk and from the customer success team. And I was engaged with TBI to run that project. And TBI contacted us now a year ago with the question that they had to change the premise of a data center. And Jeroen asked me the question, is it possible to run the entire workload of Autodesk in the cloud? And with that question, I would like to hand over to Jeroen.

JEROEN PAT: I have my own phone. Yeah. So that question has been raised by TBI. I'm working for TBI. My name is Jerome Pat. They're an innovator of TBI. So I want to look out further for five years. But my directors keep me back and they said we have a huge problem.

And the problem is that we have an old situation of tools. And those tools are not working for us. Those tools are not being placed well. We had multiple reports that we have multiple versions, multiple systems that are not cooperating right. And what we also saw that on every project the people are for themselves arranging stuff.

And we'll get to that. So I'm working for TBI. And basically, TBI does a lot of utility work in the Netherlands. So if you are in the Netherlands, I hope that you go. Sometimes in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, you will see some of the projects that we do. And we are very proud of it.

So we will tell you all a little bit more. But to have a little bit of a scope who we are. We are a company of 1.6 billion. We have 6,000 employees under our roof. But we also connect to our lot of partnerships. And we do in every [? assets ?] of the world. So we make a city. So we do infrastructure, building, development, really everything.

We say that we make building smarter. But for making things smarter, you have to have the right environment to do that. And saying that, we were confronted with problems in our systems. One of the problems that we saw was that we had a old legacy system with old IT departments that had to-- kind of fortresses. I don't know if you know those kind of developments, but it's like you're in an office, it's closed down and you cannot collaborate with another engineering firm.

And when you want to do that, it cost you three months to add your systems or to invest in a system that could deliver you the possibility to work together. And normally what you see is that the project is yesterday being been addressed and Monday they want to start. So three months is not a thing that we can.

So what normally is being done, they go to the store, buy a new computer, install all the stuff on it, and shadow IT is being started. The next step was that my board of directors was being addressed by Dropbox, there was a nice girl coming in. And a girl was saying, do you know that 80% of your employees are using Dropbox to share data?

To know that it was a social environment, so it was not the environment being owned by TBI so our information was scattered around the system. The first reaction of our IT department was close down Dropbox. The second day that they did that, there was a very big call that every project was down. So they have to open the system back.

But then we ask, why are they using that? And the simple question was, it was simple to use. It was editable for everybody. Everybody could add other persons to it. And with that knowledge, our question was raised. So the question that we raised to the Microsoft team, the Citrix team, and especially also the Autodesk, is it for you possible to make a Dropbox-like feeling?

So is it possible to have the possibility, so as you are sitting here in the room, that I can add you all to a project within five minutes and we can work together on the project? That was a dream that was being asked. And the dream has become true. Within three months of very hard work with these guys, we got that dream working.

In a proof of concept to be true, but afterwards we did projects with it. And those projects are also working with other general contractors. And also those contractors are now enjoy to work with that. So from POC to pilot, and now at this moment we are in the phase that we are presenting it here at AU and also on other stages how it works.

And so if there are questions about this kind of work methods, this only to know that we have asked those guys to set up a system that they owe, that they run, that they service, and that every update is done by them. Because I am an engineering firm. I'm not IT department. I'm not a software company. I want to have the system run. That's not more. So the only thing that I'm going to present here is things that run by that. The only thing is that we asked for it. Yeah? OK, then we go.

So these are the projects that we do. OK, that's nice. We are proud of it so I have to share a little bit for the context, but we also the tunnels. We have very big projects. For us it's a big project in the [INAUDIBLE]. We also have these really strange round forms. And what we see normally in this kind of projects, we work with 24 different engineering firms. And 24 different engineering firms, they have to share data and work with each other.

And you could imagine in the crisis, that sometimes an engineering firm was collapsed and the data was also there. Then we had six weeks downtime because we didn't have the drawings. I don't know if you have this feeling, but it's really a typical thing in the engineering world. So having a data centralized environment was also for that purpose very needed.

So make things smarter combines processes-- so what are your stakeholders? Why did we choose for Microsoft or why did we choose for Citrix? And especially for Autodesk. Because they are our strategic partners. As a company with 6,000 people, we work with Microsoft. We live with Microsoft. We open, [? breath the thing. ?]

So when they came with Microsoft Azure, it was a normal thing to say guys, you are presenting Azure. You are saying that that is new digital working space, could you help us with this project? The first answer was a little bit, OK. The second one was that these guys are coming in and saying, all right, we want to go.

The same thing for Citrix. We are working with Citrix for a couple of years, but more in an office application. So open office kind of tasks. Our main machines for primary engineering are the big ones that you know from HP. There are sitting around under the table and going [INAUDIBLE].

And then Autodesk. Autodesk also evolved also in our system because we are an enterprise business alignment with Autodesk, we asked them to scan our system. And how much versions of 2014 [INAUDIBLE] did you find?

MARK SLEEGERS: 15 versions that I found in their system.

JEROEN PAT: 15 different versions and we had no alignment. So it was really a terrible thing. When you look at it from our perspective you really are going to be gray. Or bald? There is something with you that you say this is not good. So how are we going to go with that?

So that's the innovation thing. So what we did was we looked at the products that we had, we asked the guys to add that, and we wanted to have improvements. So what we did was really saying we are in this level. We have engineers in the phase working on a level of data exchange, Dropbox-like file exchange.

But having a process that we are going to the next level and next level will take us years, approximately five years. So what we now ask is how are we going to embrace the right level, the level of working together. The level of where you live today, like the social networks, the Linked Ins, the social thing that you really can exchange with each other.

So grabbing that and bringing it back was the challenge here. So going to the cloud was no question. Going to the market with Azure environment and the Citrix cloud was really something that we said we have to embrace. But guys, you have to help us from right to the left side.

But is this the way that we live in. So we have a process that somebody really asks old kind of drawings, old kinds of methods. So how are we getting the system as the same as they have now on the same place, but not having the guy here walking around with multiple machines?

I know if you know it, but when you are in a construction firm you have multiple projects and you have multiple places to work. So in our example, in the normal engineer has three very big set books or three very big machines to do his work. And sometimes the data is there, sometimes the data is there, and then they have Dropbox to share.

We work on this kind of locations. And the internet connection there very poor, sometimes 50 Mbit and sometimes 100 Mbit. And that's for this AU event, you know what kind of bandwidth we have. So this is running also by Wi-Fi now on the cloud workspace. So you have to know we are not tweaking things, we are alive going in the demo.

So having that said, and also know that the cloud system, like [INAUDIBLE], all the other application that will become SAS you need in the internet connections. So also that was something that we had to address. How are we going to do that? But being in the Azure cloud and being there on the location is giving us a [INAUDIBLE] that you really don't want to know. We are now in approximately less than 500 or more Mbeds in data strength. We can share you.

In the normal internet connection here is 2 Mbed? 3 Mbed? OK. So working everywhere is also something that we want to praise. It's real nice for the person, but sometimes also very nice for the company because everybody could work. For example, we have some major problems at this moment with engineering and people are working now at home with this system. So that's not so very good for them, but it is possible with this.

So to be very short summary, we have an old latency system. And we did it ourselves. So that was the old way of working. Closed down the gates. You cannot open that gate. It's a not corroborating location. Where you want to have data, I first want to have a contract and I will share you all.

The second thing is our people are more willing to work everywhere and anywhere, we are also asking them to do that. Embracing that thing is also a thing. And a major thing that we ask is, is it possible to make a system that run within five minutes?

And that is the problem that we now have. The system is not running in five minutes, it runs within two minutes. And we are so proud of it that we can share you as we on our own on the system that we can let you see how it works.

The solution, really there is no question to look at how are you going to approach this. You can do it for yourself with your own IT environment, but you could also ask the best in class. So I also see a Nvidia here in the room. We also ask Nvidia, by those guys, I'm not the one that asked it. But Microsoft and Citrix and Autodesk asked Nvidia to also join.

That was the nicest thing that we saw. Is that having the question being raised, and then adding all those other bright minds really made the process an improvement. And are we there? No, it runs like a beast. That's not the problem. But adding more features, seeing how Revit behaves, is also something that Autodesk didn't know.

Sometimes the Citrix [INAUDIBLE] of having a connection is something that Citrix learns about. And the behavior of the [? actual ?] environment, knowing that Revit needs a very high clock rate of CPU and a little bit less GPU is something where Microsoft has been added. So all those things are now being addressed or being raised and it's going to the next step. Yeah, Mark, maybe you could go further with it.

MARK SLEEGERS: Jeroen asked all those questions and what we came up was with this concept here. And the concept is called BIM Cloud Workspace. And the idea of the concept is that you can run any Autodesk software or service in a browser from the cloud anywhere, anytime. Also you can see here, this presentation is done out of the Amsterdam data center. And we are streaming, basically, here to Las Vegas this presentation here.

You can also see it's supported on multiple devices. And what we also have here is a Raspberry Pi where you can connect the Raspberry Pi basically to this Azure instance. And you can run the workload in Azure and basically run this on a Raspberry Pi.

JEROEN PAT: When there's some time, we will go to the Raspberry Pi. But let's say one more thing.

MARK SLEEGERS: So the idea is also that it is a simple concept. So in the case of TBI, it's a website. You go to a website, they subscribe for a service with their email address, they confirm with their email address, basically, the service and they can use the service. So there is not anymore, you need to go for packaging, you go to SCCM, you package with SCCM. And then you deploy the software. Now you go to a website, you subscribe for this service, and you use the service.

And once you're inside of the service, you can go to a store and you can select services. And the service could be an Autodesk desktop product, but it could also be an Autodesk cloud product. And the user can then select what kind of product you would like to have, what kind of language he would like to have, what kind of plugins he would like to have, and that he would like to have a machine.

And as I mentioned before, we are supporting multiple devices. So starting from a Raspberry Pi, to a tablet, to a mobile phone, to Surface Book, to a MacBook, or also to a normal standard desktop application. And this is also to give you some impressions about the workspace itself. So first of all, it's running on the Windows server and on a Windows client environment with Windows 10.

In other environments, like for example Amazon WorkSpaces, you have to run it on a server environment. And here you can run it on Windows 10. And that's also important for our products because our products are best performing in a client environment. They are built for a client environment. And they are working well in that environment.

You can also see that cloud applications are running also in there. So for example, BIM 360 Glue or InfraWorks. And also InfraWorks, that's an application which is very graphical demanding and especially you need to have a very high frame rate and quick response that this is working. And it's working perfectly.

We will also show later in the demo how it InfraWorks is performing and how it's going on. Also traditional applications like Revit are working in that environment. Then also important to say is that it is a cloud application and engineering application. And the idea behind that is also that data and application is in the cloud.

And with that, BIM 360 is basically the data port where TBI is storing the information. So they're using, for example, collaboration for Revit or BIM Docs in their processes. And on the other hand, you have the desktop engineering applications like Revit, like [INAUDIBLE], like 3ds Max. All those kinds of applications which are there and which are connected to the cloud and data and applications in the cloud.

Also important to know is that this workspace has context awareness. So depending which location, which time, which identity the workspace had, it delivers the application, the data, the printer, the settings, and the right security which is very important.

Also important to say is that you can set up a flexible workspace. So that means you can set up roles. And the role could be, for example, a building role, an MEP role, an infrastructure role, or a visualization role. All those roles are utilizing different kinds of products. And for example, the building guys are both using Revit, but they are using Revit in a different way.

And what's important to say is that inside of that workspace you can configure, for example, that Revit is using this certain application and this certain plugin. And the building guys are using another certain plugin. So you can have a flexible way of delivering the applications, but still have a centralized way of delivering it.

Also important is that you can support multiple languages. If someone which is based in Germany requires the German language pack, requires German settings. Someone which is based in the US may require US settings and US language packs. So you can also support both ways. And with that, I would like to hand over to James and he will talk about Azure.

JAMES JACKSON: Hey, good morning, everyone. So when it comes to our partnership with TBI and Autodesk and Citrix, there's really kind of three things that I think help differentiate or provide value to the service. The first of those is the fact that Microsoft Azure is very scalable.

So you can see in the slide where we're active in a lot of different regions, we have the largest footprint of any cloud provider, and we're continually investing, literally, just billions of dollars per year into the infrastructure. So when TBI and when Autodesk were thinking about this new business idea in this new business model, they had to think, how do we scale this out?

Where can we support these GPUs? Where are they available? How are we able to scale that out? So both scalability vertically as well as horizontally. So you can imagine if you're a large company and you need to provision, I need 1,000 desktops. I need to give my users-- I need the flex head up to 1,000.

But then after this project precedes about six months, I need to scale that down to 500. We're able to help provide that up literally in a matter of minutes to our customers leveraging our global investment on that side as well as vertically. So within your machine, if you want to have a better user experience, you don't necessarily need a very intensive computer, depending on which applications you're running.

So Revit and other applications might be a little bit more intensive and require a stronger you know CPU or GPU, we can help to leverage that scalability vertically as well to give you a more performance GPU. The second thing I want to mention is automation. So we invest a lot in machine learning and AI to help understand usage requirements from our customers.

We like to invest a lot with Autodesk and the Citrix and Nvidia team to see how we can create a better user experience to make it as seamless as possible from an automation perspective. And then finally, I just want to mention it's very performance.

So what I mean by that is we have a very close partnership with Nvidia. We're piloting right now the Tesla GPU chip set, the P40s currently with them-- or the M60's with them. We also have Pascal that's out as well. And then we have Volta coming up in a few months.

So we have a very close relationship with Nvidia. And a very close relationship with Autodesk as well and TBI to where we can prioritize and get early access to those types of GPUs for these workloads. So when you're looking at Azure and you're looking at all of this very large footprint, it really made a lot of sense to partner with Autodesk, TBI and the team from that perspective.

Finally, I just want to mention because Microsoft owns all the dark fiber that runs between all these data centers, when a user logs in-- I mean, you can imagine you're on your iPad or your iPhone-- you're able to use these services. You're actually diving into that fiber optic backbone. So you're able to transfer files very quickly.

So you could imagine some of these massive projects you guys are working on, 75 plus gigabytes. They get into the terabyte space. You're able to transfer these at very fast speeds as [INAUDIBLE] can attest to. So leveraging that CDN backbone in partnership with Akamai is also kind of a huge differentiator from that perspective.

So you can see here, this is just our N-series GPU that we've partnered with Nvidia on our M60s. There are our Tesla GPUs. So some of the configurations on that on Windows 10. And this is a little bit more information on the performance of that GPU, memory size, things of that nature. But as I said, we're also investing-- we have the Pascal chip set that's already in preview right now.

And we have the Volta coming out in a few months. And literally our product teams that manage all of our global capacity-- we're in conversations with Autodesk as this thing scales out or has a huge potential. How do we actually plan our capacity against that and partner with Autodesk and TBI more closely? And then with that, I'll pass it off to James from Citrix.

JAMES HIU: Thank you. Thank you. I have a question, actually, for this audience here. How many of you have used Citrix today? Great, about half of you. Fantastic. So I think the message here is that Citrix is a company that focuses on delivering secure digital workspace.

So part of this whole story of working collaboration with Autodesk and TBI is that we are delivering that user workspace environments to the user. Today, we have Citrix call services that basically is connecting to the Azure infrastructure. Actually, the service itself runs on Azure.

And so we have very close connections to their environment. And at the same time, allow a customer to [? spend ?] up different region of the Azure workloads and to be able to deliver these graphical application or graphic intensive application leveraged in the GPU.

So what do we offer in the product stack is that we are providing, first of all, a very simple wide range of client devices that you can use. So earlier we talked about the use cases where you can use the Raspberry Pi, you can use a PC, you can use a Mac, you can use Android tablet, iPad. You name it.

Even on the iPad, we have a complementary mouse that you can buy from us, that you can actually use mouse pairing with your iPad. So besides that, we also focus on making sure that delivering the right user experience to the endpoint, and no matter where they are. So you can be at home, employee work from home.

Or working in the office environment. We want to be able to support that. And also another area that a lot of people didn't know is that we are focusing quite a lot about your communication systems inside your workplace. So we have a great partnership with Microsoft, supporting something called the Real Time Authorization Pack for the [? voice ?] communication on the Office Skype for Business.

So the actual voice command is actually coming off on the endpoint devices with that Authorization Pack. So it gives you a very good audio experience and then separated from your graphics that is actually running from the data set. So there's a lot of flexibility and optimization that we put in to make sure the user gets the best user experience possible.

And these are the three areas we focus on. And here's some of the claims that we do. That we can reduce your bandwidth need for delivering a user experience, two times faster interactivity-- so we also support a very wide range of interactive devices. So if you have [? walk on ?] tablets, you can use them in conjunction with your creativity applications.

And also we have all the different type of delivery mechanisms such as HTML5 as a browser client as well that you can basically deliver to any browser that's modern can run HTML5. We can deliver our desktop there as well. And also you saw that. There's a little black box kept on popping up, right?

So this is actually proven. This entire desktop that you're seeing right now is delivered through the cloud. And the pop up there is basically warning us that we're having a very bad connection. But as you can see, all the transition of the slides and all that is not compromised. Even through this limited bandwidth connection that we have here on Wi-Fi. So I'm going to bring this back to you.

JEROEN PAT: Yes. So basically what we said is flip the button. So normally what our company persons see, our employees, is that they are being stuck into a very narrowed down structure by standardized systems and they cannot choose anything.

So the next step is how we're going to be popping that up to-- or flip that coin to a new way of approach. So how is it possible to make a app-wise approach? Having an application really on the fly? And afterwards, the information manager at our team has a red flag that somebody uses the software.

So what we now do-- and we will go really now in the software-- is I'll let you see how it works. So I think that that's the best way to do. So we will go out of the system and let you see how the store works. And hopefully you will see an alignment as you have an [INAUDIBLE]. And when I do it wrong, please raise the button.

So just go for the environment. We go to the store. I was just searching for other things. We have a user portal that is this here. So this is my store. I can ask here for applications. So you can see which application I already have and you can see which application I could ask.

And our approach as TBI is I give it free. We have an enterprise agreement with Autodesk so we give it free. But we have a workflow into it. When you don't use it within 30 days, it goes out. So it's not staying on the system, it's going out of the system. So when you are on holiday and you are back home and it's longer than 30 days, you have to set up your environment over.

So maybe there are some people annoyed, so we have to say it to 40 days. But at this moment, it's within 30 days no usage, it will give the applications away. So that's one. And that's very, very important because normally it cost money when there is a license in a location or in the system. So that's one.

The second thing is that people are going to use it. So instead of having the three months wait time to use the software, it's already there. And another thing that's really nice is that the updates are being done by the system integrators by itself. Autodesk does the suggested updates.

So for instance, I now have on the system Revit 2017 and I will show you a project. And a project here, what you will see is-- that you could see how many gigabytes this is. I will go to the system. This is empty. On the drive, this is our team.

Because I'm not one to tweak it here with the standard project [INAUDIBLE]. You all know. You know these shiny things that you can run around? Now I want to show you the real world. So we take a Martel, that's a project in Rotterdam. And that's almost one gig big.

So I hoped that you could see it, but here's 971 megabytes. So it's not a small one. It's also linked files, so you know that you Revit is on the edge. So having that thing done, here is the Revit model and here we go in. And yeah, Revit has the same behavior as it has on a very smart, fast machine. You wait.

You know. But it's a little bit faster than normal wait because there is a faster IOPS underneath and there is an faster GPU rendering it. So really this is a model that will come and the complete structure is being-- MIP is in, construction is in, everything is in. So just wait, that's Revit. Or maybe we go to the info works model first. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: A quick question.

JEROEN PAT: Please.

AUDIENCE: So is the Citrix interface and the data in [INAUDIBLE]?

JEROEN PAT: If we're using the Citrix cloud to connect, that's an external connector. But we have the system of the Citrix environment. The Citrix cloud is connected the way that they're going into our systems is running in Azure. So you have an Azure system and you have the Citrix cloud where you connect to. That's the most safe thing because they are keeping up the security and the machines are connected to us.

MARK SLEEGERS: So for TBI it was very important to have everything cloud based and nothing anymore on premise. So Citrix is cloud based, Azure is cloud based, [? RES ?] is cloud based, and also [? known to ?] these complications.

JEROEN PAT: To prove the fastness, 2.5 gigabytes we are going to start. So normally when I'm here, it's a 2 Mbit connection and normally it's a little bit slower. But this is the fastest that I get. So this is the behavior of InfraWorks.

Revit is slower and it will even work faster when you have a fast machine. And this is the behavior as we have. You can really scroll it. You can zoom in, zoom out. And you know that I have a poor internet connection. I hope that you all see that you have the same Wi-Fi as I have. You see some difficulties here with your email, isn't it? And I'm running here InfraWorks on Azure with the Citrix environment.

And yes, there are sometimes things are popping up, but my performance is OK. And really when you want to run it on the [? setbox ?] 620, you have to wait for 2.5 gigabytes are coming in, then linking all the data because it's a linked model. And then you have to turn it. For that you need a very fast [INAUDIBLE] card, maybe the 6,000 to do this.

But you have here the M60 and the M60 is almost 10 times more. So this is a project that we do. And really if like it, we will show it afterwards on a Raspberry Pi. It runs also there. So it's not tweaking. It runs. Going back to the Revit environment.

Hopefully we have it here. Yes, we are. Where do I have it? Did I close it? Yes, I did close it. Sorry for that. First things first, because we are mostly glad with the reports that we have, this portal. So Revit 2018 is not installed. 2018, the people that are installing this kind of stuff, know that that's almost 60 gigabytes of data, isn't it?

You have to wait and wait and wait a little bit longer. We will show you that it is going a little bit closer. So this is a request. You can push the button. We are going to request that. And what you see is now in sequence, that's been delivered by RES. RES has just been brought by Avanti, an American company.

And what you will see on the right side is that there is an update being done. And at the moment that the update is done, the Revit 2018 is there delivered. So here you see that my system is popping up. And when we go now to my desktop, you will see that I have Revit 2018 on the system.

Here is Revit 2018. One moment, it's refreshing. So that's not every time but it's refreshing only when you have a new update. And then the update is being done there. And I will go into that Revit 2018. Yeah, sometimes you have to wait but it's faster than a normal install. When I do an install normally, I could say, go away and two hours later you can come.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: What did you say?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: Yeah, it will be out of your system.

MARK SLEEGERS: In case they didn't use it. So when they use it, then they can continue to use it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: That is a little bit of technology. I don't know how it works. But those guys have made a image, made an application into it and it is rather pushed into the system or it has been activated. That's the way that it is now. And there are new ways that they are going to look at it. That it is maybe published by another way. But those are the things that are being addressed. Isn't it true, Mark?

MARK SLEEGERS: Yeah, so the updates are managed by RES in the background.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: Live Design. Who runs Live Design? Yeah, you know that it is a high graphical environment? OK, we are still on the two Mbit connection done by Citrix and Azure. And I will open a project. That's the Martel. So there it's been pushed right out of the cloud because it's not in your system. It's correct out of the cloud.

You see that it's been opened. What's standing there is-- yeah, normally it's Dutch. I see that it's been translated. But otherwise, I have to say this is one moment please. So it will be [? graphed ?] now. And when it's open then we can work on it. I also see that Revit is there. Back. Always wait. I'm always a little bit itchy.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: Yeah, I'm [? AutoFlex. ?] But this is something that also Autodesk is looking at. How are they going to do this? Because I want to have multiple people into it. So this is something that's being addressed also this year at AU with the board or with some directors of Autodesk. How are we going to cope with those licenses?

In the Microsoft world, that's already been done. In the Citrix world, it's already being done. In the Autodesk world, this is really something that's new.

MARK SLEEGERS: And so here to say is that TBI is an EPA customer and they have topo flex model and this application is using the normal topo flex environment.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: Really what you see, that store, is being delivered to our project managers and they can add people really with an email address, like Dropbox. And they can get the system.

MARK SLEEGERS: Important to say, so TBI is a holding company. They have 18 companies. And those companies have to work through each other, but they are all part of the CVA contract. And basically this is kind of the advantage, that they have one platform, and not 17 IT organizations. And this is the platform.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: Yeah, that's what we've done. OK, to be honest, we had a pilot project. And we said to those guys that we would close it only to TBI. But it was a project that we did with them and with [? handles ?] for other companies where we worked with. So yeah, it was a stupid mistake. But we give them access to the system. And yeah, they are testing it also now and the are liking it.

Also [? Arcaidus ?] and all the other companies are now looking at the system and not only in the pilot phase, looking at the system, how it works. So the question is we want to have feedback onto the system because those guys are on the edge to make it better. You know how Revit behaves. Those guys are looking at Revit as what slow is it? How can we prove it? They are looking at the technical thing and improving every day.

AUDIENCE: So for the external users, [INAUDIBLE] licensing. They have to provide their own licensing, right?

MARK SLEEGERS: That's correct, yes.

JEROEN PAT: Yeah?

AUDIENCE: What is the [INAUDIBLE]?

JEROEN PAT: That's the nice thing is that you can choose your own system. We use the BIM 60 Team and Docs environment for having our engineering data. That's being streamed I thought, sorry for that, from an Amazon environment. It's closed down there.

We also work with Outlook and Office 365 software with our OneDrives and that's been hosted into the Azure environment. And we have some corporate things. And we already have that in the [? blog ?] built of [INAUDIBLE] Azure. But we rely on the security of Citrix. So our login, our security line, and having everything set up to the system is being delivered by Citrix.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: Yeah, but that's the-- you saw the first picture with all those file transfers? I now I have 24 different locations where we store, and now we have two. And we are working together or looking at Autodesk and the guys from Microsoft to really make a enhancement that the Docs is also delivering the possibility of editing Word of Office applications. But we don't have it now.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK SLEEGERS: That's correct, yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: That's something we also look at that. First of all, we are ones who have a Windows 10 image on the system, but there are some companies that are asking now for published apps. We know that the possibility--

MARK SLEEGERS: Non-persistent. He means basically non-persistent.

JEROEN PAT: Oh, non-persistent or persistent. Oh, yeah.

MARK SLEEGERS: So the reason for that is basically because we are using C4R and that has a cache behind it. And this is the reason for a persistent environment.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: What we want to have is a clean desktop. We don't want to have the files on the system. That's something that we asked also for. So no C drive where files are stored. Because we set a [? scatter ?] thing. So that's a little bit of the thing that we want to streamline that they are sharing it on BIM 60 Docs or streaming it on the data systems.

But that's, I think, something you can choose. Our choice was make a clean system. So this is the Revit model. And as you all know, and I said it a couple of times, we have a poor internet connection. And you see what the power is of the machine. And I'm doing it not with a mouse, normally it works with a mouse best to turn around, to search, to go out.

And yes, you can also see that I did it with-- I'm not tricking out, but it's fine. It's the highest thing so it's not-- I can show you the other stuff but this is power. When you do it on your normal machine, you will see that it will blank out when you're scrolling.

I know there are some Revit users here then you are going to log in and use search, you really have blanketing where I am. You'll see that this is a full project going up and down. You can really go to it. This is a one gigabyte project. Saying that we have Life Design shown, we have InfraWorks work shown, we have this shown. I thought that we also have a ReCap.

MARK SLEEGERS: Your ReCap.

JEROEN PAT: Shall I install ReCap?

MARK SLEEGERS: Yeah, so the ReCap is probably the most demanding application we chose to discuss in terms of graphics, but also in terms of artist performance. When you have very large files, ReCap requires a lot of [? IOPS. ?] And Jeroen will also show that with a model. To installed ReCap on this machine. ReCap it's already installed.

JEROEN PAT: Yeah, it's already [INAUDIBLE].

MARK SLEEGERS: So you can just start it.

JEROEN PAT: Why do you start everything with the R? Because then Revit, R, ReCap, R. Everything is R here. Something in my mind goes wrong. But it's maybe only with me. You have a [? 24 18 set ?] and then you choose RR.

OK, so we have here a project. And this is a scanned object. So a real, scanned object. So this is a point cloud.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEROEN PAT: It depends. This is a small one what you see here because we collapsed it to one thing, but we did run it for a bigger one. If you want I can show you also. But for now, I did a little only for not sharing a lot of data because otherwise--

MARK SLEEGERS: But you can also run quite high or big sized things.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK SLEEGERS: So what you can leverage as basically James was mentioning, in a project what we did was we were leveraging a CTN network. And what we did, we used this platform here to upload ReCap data in a very fast manner.

And then they could process the ReCap data. Could go into Revit and model in Revit model and basically deliver that then [? C4R ?] to the customer. And that was a huge benefit because everything is in the cloud. The ReCap data is in the cloud. And they can collaborate from multiple places.

JEROEN PAT: I also thought that I had another search model? Is somebody from infrastructure here? I also have a tunnel two kilometers. Shall I show? Navisworks was not on the system. So you have seen the ReCap. Be sure, just try it and then you feel it for yourself. That's the way that we approach.

So as TBI, we said we are launching customer, not more. We want to use it. And we asked Autodesk, Citrix, and Microsoft how are we getting that on that level? They only said, yeah you are too small to do that. You have to have not multiple peers to do that.

So what we are now doing is having multiple pilots, multiple people who are getting in to have a broader scope and really on this moment, all the lines are agreeing to really go deep. So within months, it will be fully-- this is a service where you can work with.