New distributed workforce collaboration systems rising in the AEC market are making an end run around crippling latency and bandwidth issues suffered by users sharing work on huge building-information-modeling file sets. They are doing it with hybrid systems of local and cloud servers, along with synchronization schemes that give everyone the speed of working locally, even among teams collaborating thousands of miles apart.
Two competing vendors, Nasuni and Panzura, are pleasing customers by using different approaches to solving bandwidth and latency issues—which show up when local users open and save files in seconds, while their remote collaborators working with the same files endure excruciatingly long delays. The vendors' appliances help eliminate lags with file servers; it's a big difference for users but looks the same.