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Roz Buick, head of Trimble Buildings, at Dimensions 2016 held in Las Vegas.

Roz Buick, head of Trimble Buildings, leads a small group of media around the show floor at Dimensions 2016, the company’s biannual user conference. This year was the biggest Dimensions ever, said Trimble, with an estimated 4,400 in attendance. But half of them may be Trimble employees, judging by the number of blue shirts on the show floor.

Buick, who has a PhD in agriculture, has me hanging on every word. Not only because Trimble’s software products are vast and varied and hitherto unknown to our readership, but also because of the New Zealand accent. Kiwis just want to make me buddy up. What is that?

Buick, a 20-year veteran of Trimble, has a very big job of making Trimble building software offerings the new stars of the company. It was in 1978 that Charlie Trimble started the company using software HP had no use for but was able to position surveying hardware accurately in the field. Since then, Trimble has made its fame and fortune in hardware. But that is history. In 2012, Trimble again bought software a larger company didn’t want (SketchUp, in a surprise deal from Google) to all of a sudden become the world’s leading CAD company. SketchUp, a delight to use and free (base version), has something like 40 million users. The number of users of the perceived industry leader Autodesk? One order of magnitude lower. Trimble had already bought…