During the early 2000s, Nottingham, UK-based Union Square Software was seen by some vendors as a rival in the UK construction collaboration technology (or “project extranet”) market. However, its focus was mainly on knowledge management and internal collaboration capabilities, with its Workspace platform widely deployed as an internally-hosted intranet. As a result, I have tended to give the company less attention than its UK SaaS counterparts, though I did write about its 2010 acquisition of Archetype.
Having just included it in a list of recommendations to a London-based architectural practice, I had a quick look at the Union Square website and saw a 2013 trading update which actually gives a revenue figure (previous company trading updates – 2008, for example – tended just to give percentage revenue growth and little else). MD Richard Vincent says:
“Despite an extremely difficult market, particularly in the UK, we were delighted to finally break through £5m revenue for the first time in our financial year ending February 2013. This major achievement was reached after another year of substantial growth represented by a 21% increase in orders taken, a 12% increase in revenue booked and 54 new clients.
“Our international strategy continued to progress quickly with our new Australian office establishing itself and further success in Europe, Africa and UAE. …
“… Our process workflow toolkit has been launched, giving access to an online ‘Workflow
Store’ of process-centric apps…. We have created a development team exclusively focused on delivering
mobile solutions and our drawing management functionality has been extended to include online
commenting, approval and a Revit® connector. Finally we have completely re-launched our
training offer, moving away from traditional classrooms to a flexible and comprehensive cloud
based Learning Zone. …”
It’s interesting to me that Union Square has opened an Australian office – several of the UK SaaS vendors have also been pursuing opportunities ‘down under’. Richard also talks about the excitement and uncertainty caused by industry issues such as BIM; Union Square is holding some half-day “Towards 2016” seminar events which include a session on design collaboration and BIM.
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[…] and later that year acquired its principal rival, Glasgow-based Archetype Software (post). By 2013, its revenues had reached £5m, and it was also beginning to expand into Australasia and to […]