Autodesk
announced that in 2006 they shipped 70,000 seats of Revit. On
June 8, 2006 they stated that the achieved the milestone of
100,000 seats of Revit were installed worldwide. Current
numbers are approaching 140,000 (or so I've heard).
While this
number is celebrated by Autodesk, it seems small in comparison
the nearly 7,000,000 (a number I have heard used) seats of
AutoCAD that are in use. An NCARB survey reported in June 1999
that there are roughly 97,000 registered Architects in the US.
If we use a rough estimate of 6 persons supporting each
registered architects, which would mean about 582000 persons who
could theoretically use Revit. Most Revit teams are 3-4 persons
per project so that means that there would be around 145,500
teams of Revit users. Out of a possible 145,500 teams
(582,000/4) this would mean that only one person on each team
actually owned Revit. The number of those that actually use
Revit is most likely less than the number of those actually
owned. Twenty percent of purchased seats are typically unused
seats (my estimate), which is not uncommon in the industry for
mid to large firms. So of the 140,000 it would mean that
112,000 are in use, which would reduce the active percentage to
13% of architects are actually using Revit or 1 out of 8.
And that is assuming they are all using Revit. It is
actually a mixture of the big three or four tools. So the
numbers again don't add up to overwhelming use.
If my numbers
are wrong - somebody tell me what the correct numbers would be.
The actual, real numbers of BIM users. Not the marketing
hype.
So I think
the penetration of Revit and BIM is over estimated in the
popular thinking. Not many are using BIM on active projects.
Not all firms that have Revit are using them on all projects.
Most are using them on a small portion of their overall
workload, say 10 to 20 percent of projects.
Some firms
are championing BIM and are making great strides, but most at
just starting down the road of BIM.
Not all
architectural efforts will be moving to BIM. BIM will not
totally replace other tools at this time and may never displace
CAD entirely. CAD will remain a viable tool now and in the
future.