Asite gearing up to launch Adoddle 17

Double digit revenue growth and a ‘game-changing’ software release on 17 March are making SaaS vendor Asite excited about the future.

Asite logo 2012London, UK-based construction collaboration and e-procurement technology developer Asite is gearing up for a major launch of its new release, Adoddle 17, on 17 March 2014 (St Patrick’s Day; Asite CEO Tony Ryan is Irish so no coincidence there!). On Monday, I caught up with chief operating officer Nathan Doughty to find out more.

Background

Asite struggled in its early years, having been founded to create a construction e-marketplace just as e-marketplaces fell out of favour. It then identified (correctly) that Software-as-a-Service collaboration technology was a more sustainable product line, and initially resold third-party solutions before creating and launching its own platform in 2004. In parallel, Asite continued managing some aspects of e-procurement, developing a supplier network and contributing to a construction transaction hub, and over the years these have contributed steadily increasing revenues for the company. Asite finally becoming profitable in 2009, and in its last full financial year achieve revenues of just over £4m and a pre-tax profit of £0.511m (October 2013 post).

However, its core business remains its project collaboration toolsets, which have expanded beyond document collaboration to encompass what it has branded cBIM – collaborative Building Information Modelling (first shown as long ago as October 2006!) – and cMOB – collaborative mobile applications (August 2010) – and which was rebranded Adoddle in mid-2012.

Adoddle 17: “game-changer”

Nathan DoughtyNathan describes the Adoddle “collaborative enterprise system” as a “three-legged stool”. Pre-contract sourcing (including bidding, tendering, PQQ tools), procurement (transactions, supplier management, etc) and document collaboration/project management make up the ‘legs’ with the cBIM design management functionality forming the seat and linking it all together.

He says Adoddle 17 will be a “game-changer for Asite”, delivering greater integration between the “maturing” Asite offerings. It will provide:

  • more mobile support – the web-native, connectivity-dependent cMOB apps will be augmented by Apple iOS and Windows 8 apps, with Android versions to come (Asite’s AppBuilder toolset remains popular as a toolkit for customers to build their own apps, while some customers commission Asite’s professional services to configure an app eco-system for them)
  • more “whole life” management – Adoddle FM includes planned preventative maintenance, asset registers and other CAFM tools. Nathan also referred to “Infrastructure Lifecycle Management” (ILM) – a sign that Asite will be competing head-to-head with rival Conject in the design-build-operate sector.
  • a better user interface – An improved user experience, with more configurable access to the full menu of Asite services (Asite will meet the needs of different users from project-level users up to strategic enterprise users needing dashboard views for financial management, procurement, etc), augmented by HTML5-supported ‘in-memory computing’ and better offline capabilities.

Asite growing

Just into the second half of Asite’s financial year, Nathan said the business was delivering steady double-digit revenue growth. He singled out Australia as a growing market; Asite have had a full-time territory manager in Sydney for two years, he says, and they have won several major civil engineering (railway projects, particularly) and mining projects. The UK was “buoyant”, and Asite had diversified its client portfolio – Nathan highlighted the company’s work with the Environment Agency, Transport for London and Crossrail. Marketing in the US was more difficult (we talked about the pressures on direct sales teams – Asite appointed a US VP of Sales last July – and about partner programmes), but he insisted a recent deal with Goldman Sachs had really put them on the map, particularly as the engagement included projects across Goldman Sachs’s global property portfolio and included a significant FM requirement.

Update (6 February 2014) – Interesting article on the development of Asite’s managed hosting with Dimension Data: Asite Revolutionises Corporate Collaboration and Gears for Further Growth with Cloud Platform. Some extracts:

  • Today, Asite operates three data centres (UK, US and Australia) on the Dimension Data platform, serving over 100,000 end users for 4,500 clients.
  • Asite CEO Tony Ryan on the cBIM hosting platform (emphasis added):

Tony Ryan (Asite CEO)We’ve seen significant improvements in data transfer speed thanks to the WAN optimisation built into the Dimension Data cloud platform – today data speed is nearly 10 times faster than before. High speed data transfer enables us to deliver real-time collaborative working for our demanding global customer base and collaborative Building Information Modelling (cBIM) on our fully hosted model server. Our competitors in that particular space are just moving flat files while we’re setting the state of the art for big data technology in the architecture, engineering and construction industry by enabling collaboration in the cloud for models comprised of hundreds of millions of unique data points.

  • Asite has grown its revenues from USD 2.4 million in 2006 to USD 7 million today…. The organisation has plans to more than double its revenues to around USD 15 million, over the next three years.

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1 comment

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    • Nick Sansome on 4 February 2014 at 9:11 am

    With 4projects announcing they have a SaaS FM tool and now ASite it looks like it will be an interesting year in that space with our launch of our CAFM SaaS solution. It could also be that each vendor has a different interpretation of just what an FM application actually is and functionally is required to do. Maybe a thorough examination of the 3 vendors application and a comparison is a job for you Paul?

  1. […] tweeting; hashtag #Adoddle17). I got an early update from chief operating office Nathan Doughty in late January, but, following a further briefing on Friday, I know today will see a more detailed picture […]

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