[ Click to enlarge ]

A year and a half ago, AVEVA bought Tribon and announced their strategy to integrate the best of Tribon M3 Shipbuilding system and the best of AVEVA PDMS plant design, calling the new product VANTAGE Marine. That strategy was sold to Hyundai, the world biggest shipbuilder. “15 percent of all ships built in the world are built at Hyundai,” said Glasier. “We like to say that at least one AVEVA designed ship is launched every day. But a large percentage of those are done by Hyundai. It was really cool to win Hyundai because they've been using other systems for a long time. One of the things that won them was the fact that we were going to have the hull design capabilities of Tribon, which are by far the best in the world. Once the hull is done you have the outfitting - all the piping, and all the other equipment, and that gets into the purveyance of AEC/plant design. AVEVA has been the leader in that and particularly in offshore.” Over 80% of all offshore platforms designed and built were done using AVEVA software. “We dominate the offshore industry, particularly for topsides.”

VANTAGE Marine, aligns the best-in-class technology for outfitting and topsides from PDMS, and the best-in-class hull and ship production capabilities of Tribon. For the past four years AVEVA has been developing VANTAGE Enterprise Net (VNET), its information integration portal technology.

AVEVA shipped VANTAGE Marine 11.6, a first release, in July. “What VANTAGE Marine creates is a common ship model database which basically is made of Tribon hull information and PDMS outfitting information in a common database,” Glasier explained “We're evolving that with VANTAGE Marine 12.0 due out in early 2007, VANTAGE Marine 12 will be the migration of all the hull capabilities directly in to AVEVA's Dabacon system which is the main database that manages all this information.”

Almost all of AVEVA's major offshore projects in are in deepwater which is officially classified as water over 1500 feet, according to Glasier. “You start running into serious hull design problems at those depths. It's staggering engineering and construction work, so we're letting the shipbuilders know that in addition to hull design and production tools with VANTAGE Marine, AVEVA also has a really nice Lifecycle Information Management (LIM) capability with VNET to manage this information. LIM isn't that big in the commercial shipbuilding world but it is big in the naval world. We still have ships that are on active duty on the fleet that are replenishment ships from the World War II era.”

[ Click to enlarge ]

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita showcased the need for more rigorous naval engineering and architecture of hull design. “Because of Katrina and Rita, the industry lost something like 2 dozen platforms, said Glasier. “A couple even flipped upside down. On one of them, all the tendons sheared off. It is a Spar design, with a main hull and radiating floating arms where the tendons were tied into them. All you see now is the bottom of it--the whole platform is upside down floating in the Gulf of Mexico.” Many of these hulls are big floating tanks that cannot withstand hurricane force winds.

Another area of enlightenment for offshore engineers is the notion of the lifecycle information management system. “If you have all the information about your platform in a lifecycle information management system you could immediately access all the design, maintenance and operating procedures information about your platform. Wouldn't it be great to have that information, right now when you're trying to find out what's damaged? What do you need to do to get this platform back online?” Glasier posed the questions that many have been asking over the past couple of months in response to the daunting task of rebuilding after Katrina and Rita, or “Katrita” as many Offshore people call it.

Historically, Glasier said, once a platform is in production, they don't keep an on-line database of up-to-date design and engineering information about it. Now they're beginning to see that if they had moved the platform from as-designed, to as-built, to a lifecycle management system, they would have information more readily available to handle the damage that's occurred as a result of these hurricanes. “We think that this is going to move people toward lifecycle management instead of just design to construction thinking.”

In commercial ship design, he said, LIM is a tougher sell than Naval. “Owners want to run the ships flat out. They aren't so interested in information management. At least to date. We hope to change that thinking.”

A key tool used for as-built design is laser scanning. “The only time your design and as-built are the same is before you start building. You start making changes almost immediately.” AVEVA has the Laser Model Interface (LMI) module that integrates with Bitwyse, Leica-Geosystems, Quantapoint, Zoller + Froelich (Z+F), and Trimble, that allows your solution to the bring point clouds directly into your model. This will allow the creation of accurate as-built project models to use in LIM, bringing significant downstream value to the model now created in design, and used primarily only for construction.

Glasier concluded, “We are very excited about our future in shipbuilding and offshore, and related marine industries with VANTAGE Marine, VNET, and all the other products in the AVEVA suite. With the high cost of oil and gas, and the increasing internationalization of trade, which is using the world's waterways as its transportation infrastructure, we will be providing the most productive and cost effective solutions to the world's top firms.”


Acquisitions/Agreements/Alliances

BuilderMT, workflow management software provider for residential homebuilders, announced it has formed a joint marketing agreement with Verizon Communications Inc., a Dow 30 company. Verizon partnered with BuilderMT in part because over 550 home building companies responsible for over 180,000 starts use BuilderMT to manage their every day workflow.

netGuru Inc.'s board of directors, on the recommendation of a special committee of the board, approved a cash distribution in the amount of $0.85 per share payable on January 27, 2006, to shareholders of record as of January 17, 2006.

The distribution follows the Company's sale of the assets of its Research Engineers International subsidiary and STAAD product lines in November and the board of directors' subsequent decision to distribute substantially all of the net proceeds of the sale after repaying debt and setting aside reserves for taxes, continuing operations, and other contingencies.


Announcements

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has unveiled a series of major process improvements to its LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) green building rating system, including a significantly streamlined documentation and certification process that's now 100% online. A direct result of market surveys and extensive dialogue with the organizations and individuals who use LEED, USGBC anticipates the changes to the LEED process will reduce the time and cost of LEED certification.

Meridian Systems, provider of enterprise project management software for optimizing capital projects, programs and facilities, announced speaking engagements for Meridian president and cofounder John Bodrozic, and Meridian product management director, Tim Kent at the combined 2006 World of Concrete and Technology for Construction conferences.

Meridian was named as the leading software vendor in the categories of project management software and collaboration software for the construction industry in the 2006 National Construction-Technology Survey from Constructech magazine.
Meridian's entries include: Prolog version 7.5 and Proliance version 3.0. To view Meridian's entries by category, click on Technology for Construction.

Autodesk, Inc. announced that its Autodesk Buzzsaw collaborative project management solution played an integral role in the first major construction package that was issued in December on the Freedom Tower project. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), the architects for the Freedom Tower, are using Buzzsaw to connect the design teams, consultants, engineers, contractors and project managers from multiple firms of varying disciplines throughout the project lifecycle. During this first major construction phase, the project team relies on Buzzsaw to manage and share 3D models, design and construction drawings, streamlining the flow of all project information.