think project! acquires Austrian sales partner

Almost exactly three months after Aconex acquired the Germany-based Conject business (post), the latter’s near-neighbour in Munich, think project!, has ac­quired 70% of its Aus­trian sales part­ner i-pm GmbH.

Founded in 2004 and solely marketing think project!’s SaaS-based construction collaboration across Austria, i-pm will shortly rebrand to be­come think project! Öster­re­ich (Aus­tria). MD Michael Jug will retain re­spon­si­bil­ity for the Aus­trian mar­ket and his team and lo­ca­tion will re­main un­changed.

think project! believes the deal will in­ten­sify growth – both within Aus­tria and in­ter­na­tion­ally through its Aus­trian cus­tomers – and ex­pand its mar­ket pres­ence sig­nif­i­cantly. The deal is the latest in a series of deals which have seen think project build stakes in var­i­ous Ger­man com­pa­nies (eg: Eplass, planConnect), plus French PLM business, Lascom AEC (post).

CEO Thomas Backhmaier says:

“The Aus­trian mar­ket is an im­por­tant core mar­ket for think project!. The pres­ence of in­ter­na­tional and re­gion­ally in­flu­en­tial con­struc­tion con­trac­tors, glob­ally ac­tive en­gi­neer­ing com­pa­nies and par­tic­u­larly pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture clients such as AS­FI­NAG (Aus­trian mo­tor­way op­er­a­tor) and ÖBB (Aus­trian Rail­ways) make Aus­tria a mar­ket with ex­cep­tional de­vel­op­ment po­ten­tial for think project!.”

Michael Jug, MD of think project! Öster­re­ich, says:

“With its ro­bust tech­nol­ogy and strate­gic fore­sight, the think project! Group was the foun­da­tion for our suc­cess from the very start. We are very pleased to now be a part of this strong group of com­pa­nies and, as a re­sult, can see op­por­tu­nity for con­sid­er­ably ex­pand­ing the mar­ket po­ten­tial and fur­ther grow­ing – both within Aus­tria and in­ter­na­tion­ally through our Aus­trian cus­tomers.”

The deal reminds us that, despite its Conject deal, Aconex still faces strong competition in the central European market. As well as think project!, Stuttgart-based RIB is also strong in cloud-based collaboration, having acquired Australia’s ProjectCentre in 2012 (post) and Denmark’s Docia in July 2014 (post).