As forewarned at the 4Projects user conference in May 2015, after some 15 years, the 4Projects brandname is being retired by its US owners, Viewpoint Construction Software. The Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration solution that has been a key player in the UK market since 2000 is now known as ‘Viewpoint For Projects‘. The former 4Projects website has been replaced by a new UK-oriented site with Viewpoint For Projects and the former Priority1 application, now Field View, the key offerings.
For those associated with the the sector, this is the latest in a series of industry landscape changes which have seen several of the early UK SaaS brand names disappear (however, if past experiences with other brands hold true, UK users may still refer to 4Projects for some months, even years to come).
BuildOnline, Bidcom, Citadon and various successor brands (eg: Sword, CTSpace) have come and gone, as has Bricsnet; Cadweb and Woobius went bust in 2014; Sarcophagus has faded from view and I rarely hear from Causeway or ePin; StoreData became iSite; Business Collaborator became Unit4 before resurrecting its original name after last year’s MBO; Germany’s Conject acquired and rebranded BIW Technologies, while RIB acquired Docia; and now 4Projects is set to fade from view, replaced by its US parent brand. Among the one-time industry SaaS collaboration leaders based in the UK, only Asite hasn’t changed its name.
As a one-time marketeer, I admired the strong simplicity of the 4Projects brand (it was collaboration software for projects, obviously), and it was good to see the prefix applied to other products: 4Retail, 4BIM, 4Mobile, etc. However, having watched the slow – but in places still not complete – disappearance of BIW [my employer 2000-2009] and the equally gradual UK emergence of Conject, I hope that Viewpoint is vigorous in promoting its newly branded UK business, and ensuring consistent use of the new name and branding across all media. It will not want customers and end-users still referring to the product as 4Projects in two or three years’ time.
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