Back in June (see post), I discussed some provocative claims (in Randall Newton’s AECnews) from US vendor Newforma about ASP traction in the AEC sector. In a comment at the time, I expressed the hope that US providers would back up my own UK-based experiences.
Today (in Autodesk Takes Exception to Newforma’s ‘No ASP Traction in AEC’ Claim), Randall reports the views of Autodesk’s Amar Hanspal:
“I find the original comments attributed to the folks at Newforma … both mystifying and not borne out by facts. At Autodesk, we have seen our collaborative project management solutions—Autodesk Buzzsaw and Autodesk Constructware—gain significant traction. This month, for instance, we clocked our 185,000th paying user.”
By coincidence, the NCCTP (UK construction collaboration vendors group) has been trying to estimate the total UK user base of its members solutions. As some vendors can be quite protective of such statistics, it has not been an easy task, but with the assistance of the independent secretariat to collate and ‘anonymise’ the figures, we are making some headway (at last week’s marketing meeting, just three vendors’ stats indicated a combined UK user base of their solutions of almost 150,000, drawn from over 18,000 different organisations)
As always, some allowances need to be made; for example, we have to allow for those users which use two or more solutions; and, while some vendors (eg: BIW Technologies and 4Projects) are pure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS, aka ASP or on-demand) providers, others provide both ASP and customer-hosted solutions (eg: Business Collaborator and Causeway). I am hoping to get some more figures from the NCCTP secretariat tomorrow morning as I want to quote them in a presentation on the NCCTP market research to the Constructing Excellence members’ convention in London tomorrow afternoon.
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[…] Condemning project extranets as “digital landfills” and insisting that “the ASP experience has no positive traction in AEC”, they attempted to justify their network-based system by making what I felt were alarmist and inaccurate statements about project extranets. OK, Newforma’s system may appeal to individual firms needing to share information across multiple offices, but, I argued in a point-by-point rebuttal, many AEC project teams are multi-disciplinary, multi-company, highly fragmented, geographically dispersed and often highly mobile. For them, ‘Cloud’-based Software-as-a-Service tools are a tremendous benefit, and had already achieved high AEC traction – a point also supported at the time by Autodesk (post). […]