Offered as both a Software-as-a-Service and on-premise solution, M-Six’s VEO BIM application doesn’t yet compete with document and project management platforms, but it may do one day….
At last October’s Newforma user conference in London (post), I first heard about Oregon, US-based M-Six‘s VEO platform (with Newforma Project Center, this enabled a building information model to be viewed, and to roll-back through process data such as RFIs and see relevant BIM views – efficiently delivered using delta “diff” files). Newforma was one of the first to integrate this technology, but it is now available separately from M-Six, who officially released VEO on 6 February 2013.
The cloud-based VEO platform (it can be deployed from VEO’s cloud servers, from ‘private clouds’, or as an on-premise toolset) supports several visualisation and collaboration applications that can be used in the design, construction, and operation of buildings and other assets. At one time, each tool had its own name (though these no longer appear to be used), but they neatly summarised the envisaged functionality (with strong caveats that some functionality isn’t yet fully formed):
- VEO Lux for navigation and visualisation – VEO currently supports Autodesk Revit and AutoCAD, with Graphisoft and other formats to be supported “in the near future”, and can deliver photo-realistic images but not animations.
- VEO Logic for coordination and validation – though its clash detection “functionality may not match that of your existing coordination application”
- VEO Time for scheduling and sequencing – again, its functionality “is not yet capable of supporting all the needs of construction project management scheduling”
- VEO Archive – a model-linked document library – “VEO won’t replace a document management solution that provides document release management with configurable workflow tools” (so early partner Newforma retains value, as could other document collaboration solutions – though much will depend on the integrations achieved between them and VEO; a thought: could SaaS firms license VEO and offer it as part of their hosted solution?)
- VEO Track for asset tracking
- VEO Pulse, providing real-time sensor data
In the two latter respects, and bearing in mind that VEO will be available as an Apple iPad app (“coming soon”), I was reminded of Kykloud (post), while the asset tracking will also interest facilities managers and others involved with operation and maintenance processes (see recent posts on Aconex, McLaren, for example).
VEO is available on a free trial basis (currently Windows only; a Mac versions is “planned”), supported by an installer, tutorials, training materials and videos. Product pricing starts from $250/month per single concurrent user (hosted by VEO, with 25GB storage and 10 hours computing time). A project license would allow unlimited users access to a single project, with 500GB storage and 100 hours cloud compute time (and flexible hosting options), and would cost $2500 per calendar month.
