2023 Year In Review
THE INFORMATION YOU NEED, FASTER.
Thanks to everyone for another fantastic year! We succeed when you succeed so we were excited to see AVAIL being put to good use in 2023 as reflected in this year’s infographic. Searches performed in AVAIL grew 46% in 2023. Those searches covered over 120K unique search terms with over 5K search permutations of the term “door” alone! AVAIL was used to deliver content over 4.4M times across more than 25K projects!
We kicked the year off with a contest called “Show Your Cards” as a way to celebrate the fantastic work customers have done customizing their AVAIL experiences within their firms using Channel and Key Card graphics. We weren’t disappointed! Congratulations to category winners /slantis, Taylor Design, and SNHA! The 2024 Show Your Cards contest has just ended. See those results here.
We added Adrianna Schneider to the team in early 2023. Adrianna is an AEC industry expert and leader who is now heading up AVAIL’s new Professional Services team. The goal of the team is to help guide customers through their organizational transformation with content management as well as the ability to offload some of the more mundane or tedious content management tasks. There’s never enough time to get it all done so Adrianna and her team can act as a relief valve to you and your team!
Confluence
An AVAIL Education Initiative
Throughout 2023, we invested in Confluence, hosting our first regional 1-day event in SoCal and a record-setting 3-day event in Lexington where AI + Machine Learning were on the agenda. Thanks to everyone who attended and special thanks to all of those who presented. We couldn’t have done it without the generous support of Confluence sponsors Amber Book, ArchVision, Chaos, Dell, Egnyte, Nvidia, Tonic DM, TRXL, US CAD, and VIM. Special thanks to Mehdi Nourbakhsh and Samaneh Zolfagharian of YegaTech for leading the AI workshop during the event. We launched a new Confluence channel in the AVAIL Marketplace where you can find photos from this year’s events as well as copies of many of the presentations.
I joined forces with Evan Troxel to co-host a new Confluence Podcast. Our goal is to provide an in-depth look into how products and technology are being developed for the AEC industry. We have several episodes available with more to come!
Meaningful Connections
Building strong relationships with our customers is at the core of our mission. In 2023, in addition to the hundreds of Zoom calls, we had the privilege of visiting customers in key locations, including Tampa, Los Angeles, Irvine, San Francisco, the BILT conference in Dallas, the Procore Groundbreak event in Chicago, Washington DC, and the Autodesk University event in Las Vegas. These interactions are invaluable, offering us a firsthand understanding of our users’ needs and challenges.
AVAIL Marketplace
We launched a new building product manufacturer content initiative in early 2023 with the introduction of the AVAIL Select Architectural and AVAIL Select MEP channels in the AVAIL Marketplace. The AVAIL Select channels provide high-quality Revit content from select manufacturers. Expect additional manufacturers and content as the initiative grows in 2024.
The AVAIL Marketplace continues to serve partners such as A2K, ArchVision and ENGworks with reliable, direct-to-user content distribution and management via AVAIL.
Product Updates
Thanks to the AVAIL product team 2023 was fruitful as several new features and enhancements were introduced including a major overhaul of the Revit workflow and AVAIL Analytics. See the full list at the bottom of this page.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the introduction of a new ArchVision feature called FOVEA that has been integrated tightly with AVAIL. FOVEA is an exciting new product that helps users capture, update and translate 3D geometry into as many as 13 different native formats including Datasmith (Unreal), Enscape, USD and VRSCENE (V-Ray). This is an exciting development to watch as it is officially launched in 2024.
AI + ML
If you’ve been tracking the latest developments in AI and Machine Learning you know it’s exciting times as there are myriad possibilities for addressing some of the toughest challenges that face the AEC industry. Rest assured, utilizing the latest advancement in vector-based search and LLMs, we’ve been experimenting with new capabilities that promise to unlock several exciting new features in AVAIL. Stay tuned!
The Road Ahead
Exciting developments await in 2024. Early in the year, we will introduce an automated application version management solution for Revit families. If you attended Autodesk University this past November you may have seen our preview of an exciting new feature we call Related Content. As the name suggests, Related Content will support creating associations between content of multiple types as well as from multiple sources. Related Content will enable associations between technical content such as a detail that is connected to a 3d model as well as materials or even training material. The possibilities are endless. We’ll also be introducing a new feature that will enable new ways to create and manage lists of content that can be shared among co-workers.
Thanks again for a wonderful 2023! We look forward to the conversations and time we get to spend with each of you.
Randall Stevens | CEO
By The Numbers
AVAIL is designed to help manage and deliver all the digital information being generated and managed within our customer’s environments. Content and files supporting Revit workflows continue to be the dominant file types being accessed through AVAIL. But you didn’t stop there! Testament to the increasingly broadening use is the fact that we’ve seen over 1,000 different file formats in AVAIL.
Another piece of information related to search you may find interesting is that the average text-based search within a single Channel of AVAIL returned an average of 85 files matching that search, a decrease of 29% over 2022. When you broaden your search using the “Global Search” on the Home screen the average number of returned files is 282, a decrease of 21% over 2022. We read that decrease as a good thing. It indicates that an increasing amount of metadata (eg. Tags) on the content is enabling improved targeting of search results!
Countries Where Our Customers Operate: 100
AWS Servers: US East and Sydney, Australia
EC2 Production Nodes: 17
AVAIL Channels Managed: 19,760
# of Files Indexed in 2023: 4,060,948
# of Tags on Content in AVAIL: 84,239,631
Most Searched Term: Door
Permutations of searches containing “door”: 5001 (this was a significant just from 2022 that was unearthed through improved analytics capabilities)
New Features In 2023
The product team spent 2023 working on a revamped Revit workflow, improvements to AVAIL’s underlying search capabilities and AVAIL Analytics.
Revit Workflow
We kicked off the year with a major overhaul of the Revit workflow introducing a new, streamlined drag & drop methodology from the AVAIL Desktop that makes getting content into Revit, well, as easy as drag & drop!
Learn more here.
Channel Groups + Application Mappings + Scoped Search
We had several new capabilities accompanying the AVAIL Desktop 4.5 release in August. New features include Channel Groups that make navigating a growing collection of Channels easier. Channel Groups are coupled with a new feature called Application Mappings that provide targeted search capabilities from applications such as Revit. Underlying these features was a major overhaul to the underlying search engine that powers AVAIL, enabling more accurate search results through what we refer to as “Scoped Search(es)”.
Learn more here.
AVAIL for Revit – Project Navigator
The work in support of Revit workflows continued with the introduction of support for View Templates through the AVAIL Harvest application and a major AVAIL for Revit feature update with the introduction of Project Navigator. Project Navigator extends Revit’s native project browser to help you navigate the dense information you must endure as your projects grow. Project Navigator provides you with new search and filtering capabilities, an Instance Navigator that pinpoints the exact element you need in the project, and, of course, quick access to extending your searches to AVAIL to find the exact content you need!
Learn more here.
AVAIL Analytics
We also had a complete overhaul of AVAIL Analytics introducing new and improved analytics features built on the backbone of Microsoft Power BI. If you haven’t seen the new and improved customer dashboards check them out here and watch for new analytics capabilities to be integrated directly into the AVAIL Desktop application coming soon.
Learn more here.
AVAIL Select
New content is at your fingertips. Enterprise customers now have access to manufacturers’ content with AVAIL Select. Head to the AVAIL Marketplace and subscribe to the AVAIL Select | Architectural and AVAIL Select | MEP channels.
Learn more here.
History | Reflecting on our journey, achievements, and progress in 2022 and 2021.
