INDUSTRIESI01Architecture & Engineering
Models that open
in seconds, not minutes.
IT for architecture and engineering practices. We know what a Revit central model does to a network, why Bluebeam sessions matter more than email, and what it takes to keep a design team working at pace.
WHAT WE HEAR
The four sentences we hear most in your sector.
- 01
Opening the central model takes twenty minutes on a Monday.
Almost always the network path between the workstation and where the model lives, not the workstation. It is measurable, and once measured it is usually fixable without buying anything.
- 02
Every machine is specified differently.
One graduate is on a laptop that cannot hold a large model in memory while a partner has a workstation running email. Standard builds per role fix this once rather than every hire.
- 03
Nobody knows who has which licence.
Autodesk, Bluebeam, and Adobe seats accumulate against people who left, and named-user licensing means you are paying for all of them.
- 04
Site staff cannot get to the drawings.
The common data environment works beautifully in the office and falls over on a phone at the far end of a site with one bar of coverage.
THE STACK
The systems you actually run.
Not a list of logos. These are the platforms we support, migrate, and get called about in this sector. If yours is missing, it usually means we have not worked with it, and we will say so rather than nod along.
Design and documentation
These decide your workstation specification, and the specification decides how much of a working day your people spend waiting.
- Autodesk Revit
- AutoCAD
- Civil 3D
- Navisworks
- ArchiCAD
- Rhino
- SketchUp
- Adobe Creative Cloud
Review and markup
Where coordination actually happens. Session performance and file locking cause more lost hours here than anywhere else.
- Bluebeam Revu
- Bluebeam Studio Sessions
- Adobe Acrobat
- Solibri
Common data environments
Usually chosen by the client rather than by you, which means you need to work in several of them at once.
- Autodesk Construction Cloud
- BIM 360
- Procore
- Oracle Aconex
- Asite
- Viewpoint For Projects
Practice and project management
The system of record for time, fees, and project information. Migrations here are the ones that make people nervous, with good reason.
- Deltek Vantagepoint
- Deltek PIM
- Deltek Vision
- Synergy
- Abtrac
- WorkflowMax
- Xero
Infrastructure underneath
Model performance is a storage and network problem long before it is a software problem.
- Revit Server
- High-speed local storage
- Multi-site replication
- GPU workstations
- Colour-accurate displays
- Large-format plotters
WHERE WE HELP
Four things we do for architecture & engineering specifically.
- 01
Workstations specified for the work
A standard build per role, sized against the models you actually open rather than against a reseller’s recommended configuration. Memory and storage speed matter more than the headline processor for most of what you do, and we will tell you where not to spend.
- 02
Model performance measured, not guessed
We time how long a central model takes to open and synchronise, then work out where those seconds are going: the link, the storage, the workstation, or the way the model is structured. Only the last one is not ours to fix, and we will say so plainly.
- 03
Licence and seat control
A current register of every Autodesk, Bluebeam, and Adobe seat, who holds it, and when it renews. Named-user licensing punishes practices that grow and shrink with project work, which is most of them.
- 04
Site and client access
Drawings and markups reachable from a phone on site and from a client’s common data environment, without anyone emailing a PDF of the current revision to be safe.
MIGRATION
Deltek Vision is on the clock. Plan the move rather than inherit it.
Deltek has moved Vision 7.6 to sustaining support, which means no new enhancements, hot fixes, or regulatory updates, and Deltek Cloud access for Vision customers winds down in the first quarter of 2027. The supported path is Vantagepoint.
That is a deadline rather than a suggestion, and it lands on the system holding your timesheets, your fees, and your project information. Practices that plan it treat it as a chance to clean up project structures and reporting. Practices that leave it discover that data migration is the part everyone underestimates.
We handle the technical side of the move and the project information that sits alongside it, including Deltek PIM. Where an alternative platform would genuinely suit you better than Vantagepoint, we will cost that too rather than assume the vendor path is the right one.
Where most practices are
- Vision on sustaining support, no further updates
- Project data structured the way it was in 2014
- Reporting rebuilt by hand each month
- No tested export of historical project information
Where the move should land you
- A supported platform with a known upgrade path
- Project and phase structures rationalised on the way across
- Reporting that refreshes on a schedule
- History preserved and verified, not assumed
What is actually in the system, what is still used, and what has not been opened since a project closed.
Vantagepoint or an alternative, costed against your fee model rather than against a generic case.
Staged, with a parallel period and a verification pass over the first full billing cycle.
Reporting rebuilt once, properly, so nobody is assembling it by hand again next month.
WHERE THIS COMES FROMDeltek has published the Vision sustaining support and Deltek Cloud wind-down dates. We have not seen a retirement date announced for Deltek PIM, which is still receiving releases, so we treat a PIM move as a choice rather than a deadline.
WHAT IT COSTS
Per user, per month, plus project work
Ongoing support is priced per user per month and scales with your head count, which suits a practice that grows and shrinks with project work. Workstation refreshes, migrations, and office moves are quoted as projects so they sit in a capital budget rather than inflating the monthly fee. We can also finance a workstation refresh across a term if the upfront number is the obstacle.
WHERE TO START
The services that matter most here.
FAQ
Questions from your sector
01Why does our Revit central model take so long to open?
Four things account for almost all of it: the speed of the link between the workstation and wherever the model is stored, the storage itself, the memory in the workstation, and how the model is structured internally. The first three are ours to measure and fix. The fourth is your BIM team’s, and we will tell you when the problem is genuinely in the model rather than in the infrastructure, because throwing hardware at a badly structured model is expensive and does not work.
02What workstation specification do we actually need for Revit?
It depends on the size of the models you open, which is why we would rather measure yours than quote a generic configuration. As a rule, memory and fast local storage matter more than the top processor for day-to-day documentation work, and a discrete GPU matters for visualisation rather than for drafting. Buying the highest specification for everyone is a common way to spend twice what you needed.
03Should our models live on a local server or in the cloud?
For most New Zealand practices with one or two offices, large model files are still best read and written locally with replication or synchronisation behind them, because working across the internet on a multi-gigabyte file is slow no matter how good your connection is. Cloud-hosted common data environments are the right answer for sharing and coordination with clients and consultants. Most practices need both, with a clear rule about which files live where.
04Can you work inside our clients’ common data environments?
Yes. You rarely get to choose these, since the client or the head contractor picks the platform, so you end up working in Autodesk Construction Cloud on one job and Aconex or Procore on the next. We handle the access, the permissions, and the onboarding of your people onto each one, and we keep a register so leavers are removed from client platforms as well as from yours.
05How do we stop paying for Autodesk seats we are not using?
By keeping a live register rather than reconciling once a year at renewal. Named-user licensing means a seat assigned to someone who left in March is billed until somebody reassigns it. We track assignment against actual usage and flag the gap before the renewal date, not after it.
06Do you work with engineering practices as well as architects?
Yes. Structural, civil, geotechnical, and building services practices run a different mix of software but the same underlying problems: heavy files, model coordination, client-imposed platforms, and project-based head count. The stack changes, the approach does not.
Start with the model open time.
It is the number your people feel every day and the one nobody has measured. We will measure it, tell you where the time is going, and what it would take to get it back.
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