It’s not just about the quality of construction collaboration software – the infrastructure used to deliver that SaaS technology is critically important too.
A repeated thread during last week’s “Viewpoint for Projects“ customer summit in London (post) was the improvement delivered by the company’s switch from BT hosting in Glasgow to hosting with Rackspace in London (post; the company also hosts data with Amazon Web Services in Australasia and the US). The initial move apparently involved transferring some 33TB of data, but has already delivered a 30% performance improvement, UK MD Alun Baker claimed. The company has almost 220,000 registered users, and is adding around 5000 new users per month; users generate around 1.2TB of additional data every calendar month, and by the end of 2015 Baker reckons total stored data will top 50TB. According to a user survey, he said 77% of 4Projects users rated the system’s performance as “better or much better” than competing systems; only 4% rated it worse.
UK rival Asite began to migrate its platform to one provider, Dimension Data, in 2006, delivering an eventual claimed 30% cost saving (see September 2014 news release). And we learned in late 2014 that Australia-based rival Aconex was also embarking on a two-year transition to migrate most of its hosting infrastructure from various third party data centres to one (as yet unnamed) provider with data centres located in each of Aconex’s operational regions (post).
But moving provider isn’t always necessary. Conject UK users’ data, for example, has been hosted by Attenda since the then BIW Technologies was founded in 2000, and as part of its service to the SaaS vendor managed hosting provider Attenda schedules upgrades to its infrastructure as growing demands make them necessary. Over the next three weekends, Conject’s infrastructure and hosting environment is being upgraded to “enhance security, resiliency and performance“; users have received notifications showing their sites will be unavailable from 6pm BST on the Friday evening to 5am on the Monday morning for one of these weekends (29 May-1 June, 5-8 June, or 12-15 June).
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[…] do match it as a project-wide collaboration tool, frequently paid for by single customers, on an industrial strength platform, and with pure browser-based access (for example: the Europe-based vendors 4Projects/Viewpoint, […]
[…] wrote recently about SaaS construction collaboration technology vendors upgrading their hosting infrastructure, noting how 4Projects, Asite, Aconex and Conject had either already upgraded, or were in the […]