As mentioned last week, the new CTSpace website is taking shape, adopting the ‘look and feel’ of the parent Sword Group website, and with a new CTSpace logo incorporating the words “A Sword Group Company”. It’s a good-looking site – I like the animated photographs on the home page.
CTSpace claims 135,000 users (though this will probably be a historical figure combining the registered users of BuildOnline and Citadon since 2000, plus sundry other firms acquired over the years – see Investing in a dot.com/SaaS business- a history), working on 11,000 projects across 22 countries (as I’ve written several times – here, here and here, for example – there is a need for a sanity check to be applied to the user community figures and other statistics claimed by various vendors).
Perhaps reflecting the different strengths of the product set in different markets (UK: BuildOnline-centric; US Citadon-centric), there are differences in how the CTSpace’s solutions are listed. For example, in the UK it’s:
- document management
- business process automation
- business intelligence
- AEC specific template
In the US, the products appear in a different order, with the addition of cost management (following the acquisition of ViaNovus):
- business intelligence
- business process automation
- document management
- cost management
- AEC specific template
Reading the US version of the site, Sword talks about the web-based survey conducted among US users of its CTSpace products (see previous post) – presumably, these relate mainly to the Citadon user base:
Of those users who replied 27% had been users for less than 6 months, while 67% had been users for more than 1 year, which included 27% who had been users for more than 3 years.
The CTSpace products scored highly for ‘Flexibility’, ‘Ease of Use’ and ‘Relationship built with the CTSpace Management, Support and Development Team’.
The Business Process Designer (BPD) that is used to define business process as workflows was highlighted by the users as a key strength of the product.
The Professional Services were also highly rated with everybody rating them as satisfactory or better in the categories of ‘Quality of Deliverables’, ‘Timeliness’, ‘Technical Skills’, ‘Product knowledge’, ‘Quality of Training’ and ‘Overall Experience’.
The CTSpace account executives received particularly high marks with an average score of more than satisfied for the ‘Overall Relationship’, ‘Professionalism’, ‘Responsiveness’ and most important ‘Knowledge about the Customer’s Business’.
SWORD was delighted to achieve an overall average score of ‘satisfied’ amongst all the users.
