McLaren Software is building new BI and BIM capabilities into its FusionLive SaaS construction collaboration platform.
London-based SaaS construction collaboration and (since October 2012) CAFM technology vendor McLaren Software has released a new version of its FusionLive SaaS platform including a new business intelligence (BI) portal with some building information modelling (BIM) capabilities. According to the news release:
“The Business Intelligence (BI) portal will help deliver predictable, productive and profitable projects by providing quality data to support management decisionmaking and reduce process bottlenecks. In addition to a new BIM 3D viewing experience, the users will be able to merge two or more models as well as generate COBie compatible work sheets from models.”
McLaren Software has quietly seen a couple of management changes in recent months. Chief marketing officer Tim Taylor moved to Bentley Systems in late 2013, a new US-based marketing VP was appointed in October, and CEO Paul Muir now has a more strategic role in parent company Idox plc as chief strategy officer for the EIM (Engineering Information Management) division of the group. Former HP, Intergraph and – most recently – GL Noble Denton executive Peter Russell-Smith is the new CEO of McLaren Software and is quoted in the news release:
“Worldwide our SaaS customers build critical infrastructure and need real time meaningful information on their schedule. The Business Intelligence Portal increases their visibility of real time project information enabling them to make informed decisions needed to stay on schedule. We’re investing heavily in supporting management decision making, simplifying access to engineering documentation for the mobile workforce, and building information modelling (BIM) capabilities integrated with McLaren’s computer aided facilities management (CAFM) solution.”
I’ve noted business intelligence becoming a recurring theme among the SaaS AEC collaboration vendors in recent years, as they’ve looked to move beyond their document collaboration roots. For example, capabilities were being developed in Conject’s UK division five years ago, and were eventually launched in January 2012 (post), Asite talked about business intelligence at its recent Adoddle 17 launch, it’s on the Viewpoint/4Projects roadmap too (post), and offered in the US by e-Builder too (post).
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Did you notice, that Project Collaboration no longer appears in 4Projects partner page? Interesting …!
http://www.4projects.com/OurCompany/OurPartners.aspx
Author
Thanks, Anonymous, I hadn’t noticed. Will be talking to 4Projects soon so will ask about their partner strategy.
Paul
Author
After talking to Viewpoint today, it appears that the company is keen to deploy a directly-employed sales team in Australasia (it already has a Melbourne-based ERP team). This will end the 4Projects branding in that region (it will assume the ‘Viewpoint for Collaboration’ branding introduced last year in other established Viewpoint markets).
I hope the ANZ team is well-briefed – or, ideally, completely separate to the ERP team. Selling SaaS AEC collaboration is very different to selling on-premise ERP, and entrusting the former to sellers of the latter is unlikely to be successful. Just ask Conject about its reseller relationship with Sage in north America….
[…] to the marketing moves I mentioned in April, McLaren Software has been making more changes to make its engineering information management (EIM) […]
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