[kyle.bernhardt]

Andre,
Oh so tempting, I'd love to answer a lot of that...but I'd probably lose my job, and I really like my job.

I'll put it this way. Product directions, and thus the features that we develop, are driven by the requirements of the market for each product. You in the community are that market. If the architectural community stands up and says "We want the IES integration and analysis capabilities A, B, and C, and we don't want anything else until we get it" (huge exaggeration to make a point), then we would go ahead and do it as a top priority. The reality is that beyond things such as these sorts of analysis capabilities, the Revit Platform, and it's vertical products can always do things better to support traditional design workflows, performance, usability, user productivity, scalability, content, construction documents, quality, and many other things, you get the idea. Different people want different things, different companies want different things, and different countries want different things. Point is, there are many factors and considerations that need to be taken into account when choosing product direction and the features, and the entire market as a whole must be taken into account. Just a little insight into the process we go through in setting direction, makes for some fun meetings and very difficult decisions.

Does that mean that I'm saying "no, it's not gonna be in Revit Architecture"? No, I'm not saying that. I actually don't have much impact on that anyways. What I'm saying is that if the market wants it, and it will significantly benefit our customers, we'll probably deliver it. Our heads are not in the sand.

Obviously, the MEP product market is traditionally more involved in analysis, and this drives our product direction, hence the IES link. We will continue to develop the program to better meet the needs of MEP engineers around the world. What you see in the product today is our best effort to meet those needs. Does that mean that there is a benefit to architects along the way? One could certainly make the case. We in the different Revit Product Teams don’t make decisions in a void and will take into consideration cross-discipline opportunities that can help make the Revit platform the hands-down best solution for all disciplines.

As for analysis, here’s my take. THIS IS IN NO WAY A STATEMENT ON OUR PRODUCT DIRECTION, just my opinion as a Mechanical Engineer and technology dork. It's logical that data required for analysis reside on the elements that exist in the building model itself, and not in some wizard, that’s part of the whole BIM concept. You make a change to a wall thickness, that changes the resulting U value. It’s logical that the data required for analysis be entered by the user best suited for handling that data. If it’s a wall construction, that’s the architect; the supply air temperature, that’s the engineer. It’s logical that if the data exists in the building model in the first place, that one doesn’t need to re-create that data to carry out analysis. You shouldn’t need to locate light fixtures inside your analysis model for point-to-point lighting analysis when they already exist in the model. It’s logical that elements be intelligent, and be able to accurately represent their real-world cousins. A wall should know it’s U value according to what it’s made of, an air handler should know it’s carbon footprint to manufacture. In order to drastically reduce the barriers to completing analysis, and in the process change the way we think about designing buildings, we’ve got to do these things, and do them well.

Once again, stepping off my soapbox....

Even with that being my feelings on the topic, that doesn’t mean that I’ll try to go ahead and make that a reality tomorrow, I still need to deliver what the market wants, what benefits them the most and gets them to use our software. I think I covered that topic in great detail above.

I know I haven’t really answered your question directly, I’m pretty sure you didn’t expect me to anyways, but hopefully that helps you answer it by yourself.

Cheers,

Kyle B