It's no surprise that Jay Bhatt sees the future through a global lens. After spending childhood summers in India, he now has a front-row seat on the massive construction efforts taking place in developing countries, thanks to his role as vice president of the architecture, engineering, and construction solutions division of Autodesk, the global leader in 2-D and 3-D design software. "I'm very passionate about globalization," Bhatt says. "It's fascinating how these cultures are coming to work together on products. In the past, you would have never seen an Indian architect and a Chinese engineer working together."

If Bhatt has his way, that architect and that engineer will be sending their drawings back and forth via Revit Architecture, an Autodesk product he champions. Bhatt feels strongly that Revit can not only facilitate globalization, it will help produce more energy-efficient buildings.

Only about 5 percent of architects, Bhatt estimates, currently use building information modeling (BIM), which is the central characteristic of Revit. With bim, building professionals put all of the variables in building design into a database. This information can be used for design decision-making, producing high-quality construction documents, predicting performance, cost-estimating, and construction planning--and, later in the building's life cycle, for managing and operating the facility.

In short, BIM has the potential to streamline the building process, which would be an invaluable asset to developing countries as they embark on a construction boom. bim can also act as a catalyst for sustainable design, Bhatt contends. "With a database-oriented system, you can do a solar analysis and do energy analysis," he says. "We need to compute the environmentally insensitive behavior of a building and make changes and provide dynamic results."

Is Bhatt idealistic in thinking that Revit and BIM will soon make buildings greener around the world? Maybe not: Autodesk already has one product that dominates the market. "It's pretty much the language in which architecture is spoken," says Roopinder Tara, editor of Tenlinks.com, a website for technical professionals. "If architects want to communicate their design, they will use Autocad."

Return to Profiles in Power