Forget the investigations, an email has arrived from Conject CEO Colin Smith, mentioned in yesterday’s post about think project!, re-asserting the rival Munich, Germany-based group’s claim to be second largest SaaS vendor in the architecture, engineering, construction and operator space:
The answer to your question “has ThinkProject been able to overtake CONJECT?” is no.
At €17.17m [£14.53m or US$22.6m] our revenues were down, largely due to the difficulties in the FM portion of our business that we already discussed, but they were still €1.67m greater than ThinkProject for the same period. So sorry ThinkProject, nice try, but no cigar!
Looking underneath the headline figures, gross order intake (a key indicator of future revenues for SaaS companies) during 2012 was €23.2m [£19.63m or US$30.53m] and for Q1 2013 grew even more, to €6.94m for the first three months. Our new SaaS FM product is now on full release in Germany, on-time as promised, and we have many new capabilities (including BIM) emerging from our development group over the coming year, plus several new regional offices to drive future organic revenue growth.
So to mis-quote Mark Twain “reports our our death have been greatly exaggerated” as we’ve never been in better shape!
These numbers do suggest that Conject has finally returned to growth after its flat, post-acquisition period. My own soundings had suggested that Conject had not suffered a such a dramatic dip, but think project’s German market leadership assertion may require a closer definition of what the two mean by German market and more detail of their geographical spread of revenues.
Update (16 May 2013) – I talked to think project!’s CEO Thomas Backmaier this afternoon, and he clarified his comparison. While very complimentary about Conject, he said his business’s revenues are almost solely (98%) focused on SaaS-based project collaboration, while he regarded Conject’s revenues as being drawn from a wider product portfolio, including facilities management – where some income is generated by in-house hosted (so non-SaaS) products – and cost management. In other words, he was making a distinction on a like-for-like basis.
Thomas went on to talk about recent wins in the Netherlands (major highway projects for BAM) and in Poland (a series of power plants) and said think project! had enjoyed growth of around 17% in the first four months of 2013. He was also keen to highlight the company’s development of mobile tools: Apple iOS and Android apps are being used for non-conformance reporting on offshore windfarm projects, for example.
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