S1 Ep 4 - Biplab Sarkar on Vectorworks Growth and the Mac Question

We catch up with Biplab Sarkar on his path from IIT Kharagpur to the helm of Vectorworks, tracing how reverse engineering and solid modeling informed bold moves in growth, acquisitions, and product focus. He shares candid takes on Autodesk’s dominance, Mac vs Windows tradeoffs, AI’s promise, and digital twin reality.

• IIT roots shaping a career in CAD 
• Mechanical engineering to point clouds and reverse engineering 
• ICEM, Intergraph, PTC: lessons from early CAD roles 
• Vectorworks leadership, partner acquisitions, and revenue growth 
• Competing with Autodesk and choosing niche markets 
• Parasolid adoption and modeling credibility 
• Mac user base, Windows tooling, and development hurdles 
• AI integrations, Stable Diffusion tests, and workflow fit 
• Digital twin hopes versus real-world constraints

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Background

Roopinder 0:08

Hello and welcome to the History of CAD podcast. My name is Roopinder Tara and I will be your host. On this podcast, we will explore the untold stories behind the tools that shape modern engineering and design. Each episode features conversations with the pioneers of computer-aided design, the innovators who built the software, and those who worked alongside them reviewed their work. Our guest today is Biplab Sarkar, who until earlier this year had been CEO of Vectorworks. Biplab earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and went on to Ohio State to get a PhD. He worked for two years as an engineer at Tata, then got into programming MCAD software, which led to Director of RD at PTC from 1996 to 2000. He left PTC to get into AEC software and start a 25-year career at Vectorworks. Welcome to the show, Biplab. It's great to see you again. It's been a while. I remember I first met you were two years into your role as a CEO.

Biplab 1:13

Yeah. Or CTO at the time. Well, you were there in I think you were in Baltimore for a release that included Parasolid inside.

Roopinder 1:21

2017, I believe. Your history with Vectorworks goes back 25 years. Is that correct?

Biplab 1:28

That's correct. In the year 2000, yeah.

Early Career At ICEM, Intergraph, PTC

Roopinder 1:31

And before that, the show is the history of CAD, and you're a big part of that. Your history goes back even further than Vectorworks. You started out, I'll tell you here, from your bio, first with I ICEM, then Intergraph, and PTC, and then to ...

Biplab 1:46

After I graduated from Ohio State, I moved to Minneapolis. It used to be owned 50% by Volkswagen and 50% by Control Data. In those days, we had this workstation by Control Data Corporation and had this software branch. I joined that division and worked a couple of years on that project.

Roopinder 2:13

Big on surfaces, correct?

Biplab 2:14

Big on surfaces. While I was working in PTC, they were acquired by PTC. Somehow it didn't work out. They sold it to somebody else. So I don't know where they are right now. For some time, they were part of PTC.

Roopinder 2:25

Well, a lot of times companies acquire companies, other companies, not just for their technology, but also for their talent. So I'm thinking they wanted to get you after all.

Biplab 2:34

Well, I think there is a good story there because our next door neighbor in Minneapolis or part of CDC is a client, you know, portfolio was also Windchill. So PTC acquired Windchill as well as so we were just neighbors in the same building and part of the same company at that time.

Roopinder 2:50

Yeah. You are one of many in the software business that have been educated in IIT. IIT is the Indian Institute of Technology, often called the MIT of India. Quite a few IIT people leading software companies, correct? That is correct. Sundar Pichai is eight years junior to me.

Biplab 3:09

So yeah, there are a bunch of KGP poor IIT kind of poor guys out there. Of course, now, as you know, there are 26 different IITs, one in each state. So there's a little bit of brand dilution at

IIT Roots And Competitive Admissions

Biplab 3:20

this point.

Roopinder 3:20

So it's a very difficult school to get into, I imagine, back when you were there, right?

Biplab 3:24

Oh yeah, it was five IITs, and I think they used to take 2,000 each, so 10,000 out of probably 1.5 million people that would take the exam. So yeah, it was a difficult more selective than like Harvard or MIT, right? Oh yeah. And the one thing we are still proud of, and I think it's still really true, is that the integrity of the exam was maintained and it is still there. There's no paper leakage or anything like that that happens in IIT exam.

Roopinder 3:50

So where were you from originally? In what part of India?

Biplab 3:53

I actually grew up in the I Kharagpur campus. My dad was a non-teaching staff there. So I grew up there in Karagpur. Fortunately, I got into IT Karagpur also, so I could just go from my home every day to my class.

Roopinder 4:05

I see.

Biplab 4:06

So yeah, it was a good thing.

Roopinder 4:07

I read in your bio that you know Bengali.

Biplab 4:09

So are you from I'm actually grew up, my mother tongue is Bengali. And then after IIT, two years I worked in Telco. So there I had a lot of exposure to other languages. Of course, Hindi became the primary language there. So that was a good thing. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed my exposure to the truck assembly line in television.

Roopinder 4:29

You worked for PTC, was that in the Pune branch?

Biplab 4:32

I came here for my education in graduate school at Ohio State. I did my master's and PhD and then I went to ICEM systems and then to Intergraph and then to PTC.

Roopinder 4:42

Your education is in mechanical engineering, right? Yes, yes. Yeah. So I'm gonna come back to that because I'm a mechanical engineer too. What led you to? Because that is far afield, right?

Biplab 4:53

When I came to Ohio State, the my master's thesis was on gear inspection. How do you inspect a gear automatically using a coordinate measurement machine, CMM? So it

From Mechanical Engineering To CAD Research

Biplab 5:03

was still within the realm of you know mechanical engineering. But then I expanded my horizon a little bit and started getting into computer graphics and CAD. In those days, there were not many scanning machines that could scan a particular object and actually create the CAD model out of it. That was my PhD thesis as to how to create CAD model out of you know inspection data, like a point cloud from a scanner or a CMM. It's a reverse engineering problem, you know. So that was that's how it's so it was still, you know, a lot of mechanical parts that I was scanning and trying to figure out how to rebuild them in the CAD world. From then onwards, it just became mostly computer graphics and computer science stuff.

Roopinder 5:42

So scanning scanning point clouds and making CAD models, I'm sure you could relate that to point cloud information from scanners for buildings, correct? At Vectorworks.

Biplab 5:52

Yeah, we did that. Oh, staging. You see that now as part of digital twin because digital twin, most of the time, they have the scan data of the building and then they have the IoT attached to it and stuff like that. So it is also still going on that scanning of the buildings and scanning of auditoriums and stages and stuff like that. Very important for their workflows.

Roopinder 6:12

I'm seeing more scanning in the AEC field than anywhere else. Also in self-driving cars, it's coming up a lot using LiDAR, and I'm sure they're converting those to models, if not CAD models, human models or pet models or whatever. Probably your mechanical experience led you to bring the Parasolid

Scanning, Point Clouds, And Digital Twins

Roopinder 6:28

into Vectorworks, right?

Biplab 6:30

Yeah, the first few years I was at some systems doing the door panels for the Volkswagen Golf and things like of the cars like that. And then in Intergraph, I I was part of Solid Edge working with Dan Staples. I saw that you you had a talk with Dan Staples very recently. And so I joined that team where we were doing the first couple of releases of Solid Edge. And then I moved to PTC and I started working with John Stevenson, who is who is now back into PTC. He was our leader at that time, and we created this product called Pro/DESKTOP. It did not get a lot of mileage inside the PC family of products. I was there for five or six releases. Coming to Vectorworks, there was a necessity for the family. My daughter was born in Boston, and we were looking for housing, but housing in Boston was hard to come by. We decided, okay, we cannot afford anything here, let's just move south a little bit. And that's what we did. We came to Maryland and that's how it started. I joined Vectoroworks.

Roopinder 7:25

You went from Boston to Maryland.

Biplab 7:27

You can imagine I went from Minneapolis to Huntsville, Alabama. And then Huntsville, Alabama to Boston.

Roopinder 7:33

With your family, did you make all those moves?

Biplab 7:35

In the first move from Minneapolis to Alabama, I we were just by ourselves, me and my wife. And then we came to Boston. That was also me and my wife. And then the daughter was born in Boston.

Roopinder 7:46

The longest part of your career then was with Vectorworks. You took over from Sean.

Biplab 7:50

Yeah, I took over from Sean. Sean in 2015, well, 2012-2013, around that time frame, he also joined the Vorstand in Munich. So he was part of the upper management at the corporation. And so it was two jobs he was doing. He was there as well as here as a

Solid Edge, Pro/DESKTOP, And Family Moves

Biplab 8:07

CEO. After a while, he realized that it's probably better to find a new CEO for Vectorworks. And so that's what he did.

Roopinder 8:13

Well, good for him. He reached into the company itself and got a CTO to step up. It was most unusual. I'm thinking I'm thinking of a list of people of not just Indians, but CTOs that have become CEOs. And the only one I can think of is Manish, Manish from SolidWorks. Do you know Manish by any chance?

Biplab 8:32

I do know him as a, you know, I've met him here and there at the SolidWorks events in Boston, but not kept in touch with him.

Roopinder 8:41

I thought all you IT guys had a secret club planning a takeover of the US software business. You're not gonna admit to that, h

Biplab 8:48

uh? I wish I could.

Roopinder 8:49

In your 25 years, besides bringing Parasolid in, what are you proudest of technology-wise and maybe otherwise in your career?

Biplab 8:57

I think there are a couple of things. One of them is I started acquiring some of our partners. You know, we did the acquisition of our UK partner, Australia, Canada, then Japan in 2020. We acquired the Japanese partner. And these are big businesses because the Japanese business as well as the Germany-Switzerland business is was two-thirds of our business, basically, the whole business. And so the when Rich Diehl, our original founder, when he had these partners, they had huge margins, like you know, in some cases 65%, 60% margin to these partners. In order to, that was one of one of the ways we could get some inorganic growth is to get these partners or acquire these partners so that we get not only the 40% we get, but also the 60% they used to get. So that really helped and made us a little bit bigger. When

Rising At Vectorworks And Leadership Transition

Biplab 9:45

Sean left, we were around 42 million dollars worth of revenue. And when I left this year, last year, it was 107 million dollars worth of revenue. So we still still a long ways go to go because the Germany and Switzerland is still still an indirect market. But I think that that's the next acquisition that they should they probably are looking at at this point. The company grew in the number of employees, not just in revenue. Well, because these employees from different offices UK, Japan, Australia, New New Zealand, and Canada, we kept them because otherwise, how will we do business? They know the market, the local customers and the local competitors. We kept them, and in some cases we actually grew the uh number of people. Like in UK, you know, when we acquired it was a small business, and then we just grew it to a much larger business. And so that really has helped us a lot. The second thing that I was going to mention is this is one of the things I'm I was proud of because I started this acquisition process. We also acquired a couple of small little you know, technical acquisition, like technology acquisition from our customers who basically created some plugins on top of Vectorworks, and they were so good that we had to acquire them. In addition to that, I'm very proud of the structure we have now putting inside the company, like in a really forward-looking structure that is built for time into the future and in both sales as well as R&D.

Roopinder 11:01

So you grew

Acquisitions, Global Expansion, Revenue Growth

Roopinder 11:02

the business, you grew the company. Who did you face as your biggest competitors and how did you do against them during your tenure?

Biplab 11:10

I think the biggest competition, of course, is Autodesk in the architectural CAD market or BIM market. We have a big percentage of our revenue coming from Japan, Switzerland, and Germany, but we have very little architectural revenue from the US market. We just don't have a lot of big customers in the US. We have a lot of solo practitioners and smaller firms that are using Vectorworks, but not. But they are getting pressed every day by their contractors and subcontractors to use because the collaboration is in the Revit platform or or BIM360 or AutoCAD Autodesk Construction Cloud or whatever they call it right nowadays. It's a problem for us, especially in the US market or all the English speaking markets. But in in the in the Scandinavian markets or in in Benelux or or DAC market, we were we were actually doing pretty well. And in Japan, we were doing quite well in the architectural market also. So what we did to mitigate

Competing With Autodesk And US Strategy

Biplab 12:05

that, to bring our revenue up in in the US, is to is to attack this kind of niche markets like the landscape market as well as the entertainment market. We did very well in these markets, and that kind of compensated for the lack of architectural sales in the US.

Roopinder 12:20

But those niche markets, how much of a factor is the fact that Vectorworks works on a Mac? Is that important?

Biplab 12:27

I mean, I think the uh we we are Mac also on the Windows, also. I mean, we we were Mac up until 1998. After that, we get we got we we actually ported the thing on the on the Windows. So so yeah, now both, but 55% of our customers are still on Mac. The people who are basically, you know, kind of uh artistic, they are actually using using Mac and creative people mostly. Most of the people using us for entertainment are actually using Mac, mainly because others are already using Mac. It's about 55-45. That's the divide between Mac and Windows.

Roopinder 13:00

Yeah, it was good to stay in that market because it's a market that Autodesk abandoned. Yeah, like you said, with the creative types. It always bothers me that they're called creatives when I think engineers are creative too, but that's okay. I'm not gonna dwell on that.

Biplab 13:12

Yeah, I can imagine that. But for us,

Mac Versus Windows: Tools And Tradeoffs

Biplab 13:15

uh it did not happen that way because all the pocket protector guys, the older guys actually were using Mac because we were not supported on any other platform. So it happened the other way. We were Mac only, and then from 2000 onwards we supported Windows also.

Roopinder 13:28

Given your history in the software, you're probably initially at Windows, we were probably Windows strong, Windows forward.

Biplab 13:34

Yes, both Intergraph and and Pro/DESKTOP, Pro/ENGINEER. I mean in PTC, we were working on Windows, yes.

Roopinder 13:40

Windows took over. I don't know if you have thoughts on this, but the Mac is a super computer now. I think in many ways it surpasses the uh the M1, M5 to M5 chips are ridiculously good. And uh and it bothers me. I can understand. That's actually better hardware, yes. And yet all the hardware is being ignored by these software companies, which I deal with, including you know, all of them are not porting their software, except you guys ported their software to stays on Windows. So do you see that? They're getting traction in the big space of engineering and design software.

Biplab 14:14

I can see that uh Mac development platforms are still a little bit archaic, it's not like Microsoft's Visual Studio where anybody can get in and start doing some things along with the co-pilot. Mac has always been a little bit shaky on that side that their tools not uh are not first class. Still, I think there is a lot of user interface improvements that they can do. And I I feel that's one of the reasons why people feel like it's so difficult to develop on Mac. In the last 15 years, they changed quite a lot. Every time they come up with a new version, we were always like, oh, they're going to break something. They moved so fast from the Unix best to whatever they have right now, you know, lockstep with them, because otherwise you just fall behind. And it took us a lot of effort, and people are not willing to put that much effort in doing this kind of development. So I feel like they can do it, but Apple

Apple’s Dev Ecosystem Challenges

Biplab 15:05

is not really very friendly in terms of the development environment, so to speak.

Roopinder 15:10

By the way, these days is complete unless we discuss AI. So you left when AI was, I don't know, the bubble was maybe at the biggest. How do you feel about that? How do you what were your thoughts?

Biplab 15:19

But were you we actually started doing some of the things before I left? I think you know I actually was instrumental behind you know us integrating with the Stable Diffusion model to generate prompt-based scene generation or architectural scene generation. It was part of the Czech wide effort, but we did our own and then we kind of merged it with the rest of the things that Nevechek was doing. And then we also did the chatbot for our own purposes. We did some initial things to kick it off, but I think there is a lot of other things that are going on now. Like today, I saw MIT is coming up with a video card where then they're where you know they have fed like 41,000 designs, how people design these different objects depending on those videos. If you draw a sketch, it can create a shape for you based on prompts. So I guess these are all coming together at the end of the day. And I feel like we are still kind of throwing a dart at everything that we see. Seeing whatever is going to stick is the main thing.

Early AI Integrations And Industry Buzz

Biplab 16:20

Uh ultimately, what is going to be actually helping us in doing the designs will only time will tell.

Roopinder 16:25

It's interesting to me that you're keeping up with what's going on because for me who's at this every day, it's very difficult. Not a day goes by. I don't hear about a new development in AI. You're absolutely right. People are just throwing things up there and seeing what'll what'll stick. I did you hear that about the uh project Prometheus by Jeff Bezos is now heading? I think the story, the story broke on New York Times. That's coming at this space, space being engineering design software and manufacturing with $6.2 billion funding. It's the biggest startup funding I can think of, especially in this space. So, yeah, a lot of money coming into this market. And uh was VectorWorks, other companies do you think were pressured into investing and implementing?

Biplab 17:08

Well, yeah, it was just something that came from the parent company that AI is the future, and we should invest in that. So all the brands inside the Nemetschek Corporation started investing some time and resources into this.

Roopinder 17:20

How did you counsel the person who took Vectorworks? What was it like? Oh, I'm glad to get out of this business. You take over, you handle AI. What was it like here's what to do with AI?

Finance-Led Leadership And Industry Shifts

Biplab 17:30

Well, the next CEO was the CFO in one of our other brands. I don't think he had the interest in the technology that much. We were mainly talking about how to grow the company financially and that kind of stuff.

Roopinder 17:42

So Vectorworks went from turning a CTO into a CEO into to turning the reins over to a CF. PTC was also taken over by a financial type. Not sure. I'm not sure if he was a CFO ever, but I know he's from the private equity side of things. A couple of years after he took over, parts of PTC are being sold off, right? And so it's like I called it the dismantling of PTC. Contrasted to his predecessor who was building PTC up. You were building Vectorworks up.

Biplab 18:12

Yeah, when you broke the news for PTC getting acquired by somebody, it was a shock. But uh at the same time, I could see it because I don't know, the the you know, all this IoT business that they went into and the Wind chill business and other

Digital Twin Disillusion And Next Steps

Biplab 18:25

things like ServiceNow business, or nowadays. When I was working, if I had the same mindset, I would think that these are all not really talking and working with each other, kind of disparate with each other. Business, it's not core. No, it's not. I think this whole notion of IoT helping the digital twin and the digital twin feeding back into the real life system, that kind of dream did not quite materialize, I would say. I think people are a little bit disenchanted because of that. But I thought this would be easy. We have a system. There are some systems like that, like maybe the city of Singapore have a digital twin that can that is doing that and that kind of stuff. But it is very difficult to do it for in a smaller scales or even very large scales, also.

Roopinder 19:08

So you're not writing your memoir.

Biplab 19:11

But I I could probably write one because I've been through I mean, everybody I think has the same story. I come from a lower middle class family, and all the things that I've faced

Closing, Invitations, And Next Episode

Biplab 19:20

over the years, maybe I should write it down and no, that is a very interesting story.

Roopinder 19:24

It's unusual to come that far and do so much. I would definitely encourage you to write something. Don't depend on us journalists telling your story. Nobody knows the facts better than you. It's been great catching up with you, and I wish you best of luck in your what what all the things you're doing.

Roopinder 19:40

This concludes this episode of the History of CAD podcast. Please join me in our next episode as we add to the rich history of design software. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or note someone who has stories to share, please let me know via email to roopinder@ edgetechnica.com. Get the details on our website, ENGtechnica.com/ sponsorship.