The cloud offers a host of advantages, such as collaboration, a single source of truth, unlimited storage and performance.… So, what’s not to like?
AEC firms and professionals have not altogether embraced the cloud. It may be resistance to change and big wheels turning slowly. It may be not knowing where your data is or who is looking at it. It may be a lack of trust in big tech, where big companies have been known to fail. Or it may be something as simple as letting your powerful workstation do its job rather than going through the process of submitting jobs to the cloud.
Recognizing that users wanted to be able to choose which computing resources they would use and when they would use them, companies have come up with hybrid solutions. For example, where the software runs on the cloud and all the data is kept locally, or what is referred to as “on premises.”
IMAGINiT Technologies solution for AutoCAD and Revit users is called the Clarity Cloud Hybrid option. It’s actually a new feature of the existing IMAGINiT’s Clarity Cloud, a cloud-based platform that automates tasks for Revit and AutoCAD projects. It allows users to optimize their resources, improve their cost controls and reduce their IT management needs, according to IMAGINiT.
Tasks that require little computing power, such as PDF creation, data extraction or model health checks, can be directed to the cloud. Sharing project data internally or with clients can also be done on the cloud. The local workstation can be used for compute-intensive or time-critical tasks such as rendering, clash detection and generative design. The local workstation will also let you pull up your projects faster and work on them more efficiently than if they were stored on the cloud.
IMAGINiT has offered the on-premises Clarity, with its 60 types of automated tasks for AutoCAD and Revit users, for over 10 years. Clarity Cloud, introduced more recently, offers a growing subset of Clarity’s functions. The Clarity Cloud Hybrid option, the subject of this article, has the ability to access add-ins such as Navisworks in the cloud and on premises.
Clarity Cloud can be set up with Autodesk BIM 360.
IMAGINiT offers Clarity Cloud standard version on a per-project basis, charging $50 per month, independent of the number of users. Task processing is billed at $8/CPU hour.