Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/extranet-vendors-getting-social/

Jul 27 2009

How boom went bust at the click of a mouse

I’ve chronicled the slide of BuildOnline in a number of blog posts over the past four years (notably Investing in a dot.com/SaaS business: a history), and the losses suffered by the early BO investors have clearly been shared by numerous other Ireland-based start-ups, as this Irish Independent article makes clear. Writer Roisin Burke suggests BO’s early backers lost €40 million (that’s just under £35m at today’s rates, or US$57m):

“… many respected investors lost money. Goldman Sachs and Irish venture capital firm Delta Partners, along with other high-profile names, lost a total of €40m invested in the late-Nineties when Brian Moran’s construction software firm buildonline merged with a US company in 2006 with almost €40m in losses.”

And this €40m excludes the losses incurred by investors in the other companies that were merged into BuildOnline, up to and including Citadon in 2006.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/how-boom-went-bust-at-the-click-of-a-mouse/

Jul 21 2009

Drop into drop.io

I had a transatlantic meeting via Skype this afternoon with three of the people at Brooklyn, New York-based drop.io, providers of “simple real-time sharing, collaboration, and presentation”. Their Software-as-a-Service solution has already achieved some media attention in the US – though the focus to date has been on generic file-sharing rather than on enabling industry-specific collaboration (echoing e-grou – see post – perhaps?), but architecture is one of ten sample market sectors profiled (also architectural photography).

According to the website, Drop.io provides an easy-to-use online collaboration and file-sharing service that allows users to privately share images, video, audio, documents and other digital content through user-created and controlled sharing points called ‘drops.’ (see the How To video). These drops allow users to upload content via web, e-mail, MMS, Facebook, Firefox extension, phone and fax inputs and share it on-the-fly through drop.io’s various outputs including the web, email, MMS, Twitter, iTunes and fax. Each ‘drop’ is non-searchable, non-networked, does not require any type of account registration, can be password-protected and can expire after a period of time. In short, you can share exactly what you want with just whom you want for just as long as you want.

On the basic service, drops can be created for free with up to 100Mb of storage. More functioniality is available with drop.io Manager, where personal or group plans start from $19/month, with professional plans priced from $49/month.

The architecture offering

Prior to my meeting, I read some of drop.io’s architecture-related information, including a short white paper and a data-sheet. As I explained to them, file-sharing for architects has been around for over a decade (some of the marketing messages about avoiding FTP, mail and email, enabling remote access to design information from anywhere anytime, and the virtues of computing in the cloud are now somewhat dated), and for many designers sharing and collaborating upon drawings and other documents online is almost second nature. However, drop.io’s drawing-sharing technology is based on iPaper (“Powered by Scribd“), which has no on-screen mark-up or commenting functionality; some ‘moaning architects’ may still hand-craft their comments and amendments (maybe even in red pen!), but others will see this as a short-coming. On the upside, though, drop.io’s chat, presentation and conference calling facilities offer something currently lacking from most of the established construction collaboration solutions (exceptions include relatively recent arrivals such as Kalexo – see post).

As a low-cost solution, drop.io is going to be compared with other inexpensive web-based applications such as the afore-mentioned e-grou and UK start-up Woobius (see post). The latter has been designed from the ground-up, by architects for architects, so this may make it more appealing to fellow practitioners, but – on the face of it (I’m hoping to get a more detailed look at the premium offering) – the emergence of drop.io certainly intensifies the competition in an already very price-sensitive market. It also further underlines the growing interest in incorporating Web 2.0-type functionalities into collaborative workspaces – though I suspect this won’t be a deal-clincher, at least for a while yet.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/drop-into-dropio/

Jul 20 2009

Enter e-grou – an update

Further to my post on e-grou, I received an email from e-grou’ s José Santos, clarifying a couple of points:

“E-grou is not “just” a collaboration solution for file exchange and project management. E-grou has most of the functionalities available in any medium to high-hand document management solution, namely: document versioning, document access control, workflow, task management, notifications, full text and attribute-based searches, etc. An API is available as well for integration with CRMs, ERPs and other types of solutions.

“e-grou does not target any vertical market in particular. We have customers from several areas, with different requirements, only sharing the need for document management and control. E-grou is used by companies with strong technical groups and specific document management and control needs such as construction companies, architectural and engineering design companies. But it has also customers from service oriented companies or local authorities. E-grou is fully configurable to any company’s information model. Out-of-the-box functionalities allow a trained consultant to configure e-grou to any company’s need, without requiring any database knowledge.”

According to e-grou’s Twitter stream, its free solution will be available in late September 2009.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/enter-e-grou-an-update/

Jul 15 2009

Enter e-grou

A new name in the online document management space is Portugal-based e-grou, which is about to launch a free edition of its web-based solution.

Available “soon”, e-grou Free Edition is claimed to be “the first document management software solution made available on the web as a service, completely for free” and is aimed at “small organizations that cannot afford the costs of a document management solution and still need one to do business”. As well as integration with Microsoft Office, the product also offers some AutoCAD connectors so would appear to have some potential for use in the architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) market – though the e-grou website is vague about what vertical markets it is targeting (if any).

It can’t really claim to be the first free web-based document management system (Huddle, for example, has a free price plan), while in the construction space, e-grou would be competing with the likes of Woobius (see post).

The company also offers a Professional edition (still SaaS but added functionality) and an Enterprise edition (where customers want in-house hosting). Developed using Visual WebGui (see article) and built using Microsoft SQL, from the screenshots I’ve seen the product looks like a Windows application (a plus point for some, a major turn-off for others).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/enter-e-grou/

Jul 10 2009

Google Wave and project collaboration

I wrote on 29 May 2009 about Google Wave, and have just got round to reading a great post by my friend and fellow Be2camp co-founder Jodie Miners where she talks about Google Wave and its potential for project collaboration in the construction sector. Read her post here. Like me, she reckons that Wave is unlikely to replace construction project-specific document management systems for major projects, but reckons it could be used to manage small projects, and perhaps to improve management of meetings, form processing and photo management. She also talks about the Incite product Keystone (see my post), and its potential to place photos in context on floor plans. Jodie also usefully links to some other articles on the same topic before concluding with some thoughts regarding construction use of social media (I am a bit more positive about how AEC professionals are adopting Web 2.0, but we still have a long way to go! – see my pwcom2.0 post earlier this week) and the potential use of Google Wave in facilities management. I look forward to her ‘new Wave’ thoughts: a ‘part 2’ is promised for some future date. Update (28 July 2009): Good overview of Google Wave by Dion Hinchcliffe here.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/google-wave-and-project-collaboration/

Jul 10 2009

Collaboration vendors unveil (old) plans for deeper interoperability

Last month, members of the UK-based Network for Construction Collaboration Technology Providers (NCCTP) announced plans to provide greater integration between their different applications (see news release). At the time, I was too busy to write about it, but the topic cropped up briefly in conversation with the Incite guys (post) recently, so I’ve had another look.

To be honest, the “new plans outlined by the NCCTP members” are nothing new. Ever since it was founded in 2003, the NCCTP has had a long-term vision of achieving real-time integration – so this latest “news” is simply a reiteration of that objective.

However, its members struggled to reach even the intermediate step of creating a useful export/import standard that would allow information and metadata to be switched from one member’s system to another. I represented my former employer BIW Technologies at numerous NCCTP meetings at which progress towards the data exchange standard was debated ad nauseum (see Evening, Standard?), with BIW and Aconex finally giving up on the initiative last year. Far from being the claimed ‘confidence builder’, given the different architectures of the vendors’ applications and their varying levels of process complexity, it was only possible to achieve a lowest common denominator standard, and, in many instances, whenever data needed to be transferred a considerable amount of work was still required.

Reaching the next level, which would allow users to use their favourite application as an interface to retrieve and interact with information stored in a different system (thus avoiding the need to retrain on different systems), remains – to me, at least – some way off.

Why? Well, for a start, the NCCTP now only represents a minority of the vendors active in the UK market. I understand BIW, Asite, Cadweb and Aconex have all recently ceased NCCTP membership; Sword CTSpace (formerly BuildOnline) was expelled from the NCCTP some years ago; other providers such as ePin, Union Square, Autodesk Buzzsaw, StoreData and MPS were never part of the initiative in the first place; and there are new players in the market (Woobius and Clouds UK are two recent examples – see posts here and here respectively) for whom data exchange is not yet (as) important.

Second, it is debatable whether the remaining NCCTP members deliver “the market leading collaboration tools”. 4Projects is undoubtedly one of the most widely-used systems in the UK, but they have always historically lagged behind BIW in terms of turnover and number of users, and Business Collaborator, Causeway and Sarcophagus have all lagged behind 4Projects.

Third, as the various applications have developed, the initial focus on sharing drawing and document files has diminished in importance, with some vendors looking to focus on contract administration or financial control (BIW) or building information modelling (Asite) to differentiate their solutions. Expanding functionality to cover a wider range of workflows and an expanding range of metadata will create further interoperability gaps between them and the remaining NCCTP members.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/collaboration-vendors-unveil-old-plans-for-deeper-interoperability/

Jul 09 2009

Clouds UK: a new name and a competitive offering

Earlier this week, I had afternoon coffee in London with Andy Newsham and Alison Day, joint chief executives of York-based Clouds UK. This is the new name of what used to be a construction-oriented software-as-a-service business that I previously knew as e-constructionmanager.co.uk. The rebranding reflects the wider range of services now offered by the company, some of which now pose a challenge to providers offering construction collaboration solutions, while others are clearly aimed at owners/occupiers/operators of extensive property portfolios.

Andy and Alison gave me some historical background to the business. It developed out of a business, Eurosafe UK, focused on helping companies manage their compliance on asbestos management and health and safety issues, later expanding into other areas such as fire risk management. Clients’ compliance documentation relating to their property portfolio was stored in an online information portal, and this portal’s functionality was then expanded. Now any authorised member of a client’s professional team could interrogate the database and establish, for example, the test status of all lifts or escalators operated by the company. A suite of reports also allows clients to quickly review legal compliance issues with at-a-glance dashboard views giving high-level status and the ability to drill-down to the detail of every asset.

One of the first big clients to use the service was pub chain Punch Taverns, and the company’s client portfolio has since grown to include several High Street names (TK Maxx, phones4u, Woolworths, Comet, William Hill, Virgin Mobile) as well as property developers, NHS Trusts and hotel chains.

The range of services offered has also expanded beyond compliance. For Punch Taverns, for instance, Clouds UK has enabled the company to run their construction projects online. Punch’s new £7 million corporate HQ in Burton-on-Trent was planned, tendered and built using the Clouds UK platform to manage flows of information.

Away from the construction sector, Clouds UK’s solution portfolio now includes discrete products for the property lettings market and the insurance industry, as well as an ‘Ultimate Manager’ solution offering a single point solution to any organisation managing a diverse range of property assets. Pricing is competitive too. Basic services start from just £49 per month with no limit on the number of users and 3Gb storage (bronze package), Construction Manager starts at £69/month, while the Ultimate solution costs £249/month.

“So why haven’t I heard of you?” I asked. It seems that the company’s growth to date has largely been through word-of-mouth recommendation, but this may change. Rather than being solely reliant on its own sales efforts, Clouds UK is, I think, the first business in this field to be offering franchises in 120 areas of the UK. You could secure a franchise for £18,000 (or £23,000 for franchises covering parts of London, Manchester or Birmingham).

The new branding – complete with its cute guardian angel ‘Hector the Protector’ – gives an overall umbrella to the product range, and is also perhaps one of the most explicit statements that customers’ data is being managed “in the cloud”.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/clouds-uk-a-new-name-and-a-competitive-offering/

Jul 08 2009

INCITE insight

Just before I went on holiday (Menorca, very nice), I had lunch in London with Sean Kaye and Michael Baker, respectively CEO and General Manager, Technology of Australia-based construction collaboration vendor Incite.

I blogged about Incite a couple of times last year (here and here). Then it was a small business largely focused on the Australian market but was beginning to extend operations overseas (Hong Kong and Dubai), and was delivering ThinkProject! software on a Software-as-a-Service basis.

More recently (April 2009), however, Incite unveiled its own next generation project collaboration tool and platform, Incite Keystone. This was showcased at Microsoft’s Australian ReMix Conference (11 June 2009) as an example of Software-plus-services, and delegates heard how the application had been from the ground up over the previous 12 months with Web 2.0 technologies like JSON, jQuery and some Microsoft things like Entity Framework, etc (see the Remix video here). Not yet part of the core product but really ground-breaking is an integration with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping tools (have a look at the Incite blog).

The Incite website links to a tour featuring YouTube videos about the new product’s functionality, which also extend to a mobile phone application (Keystone Mobile), an archive product (Incite Archive), and – perhaps most interesting of all – an Incite API, allowing customers and developers to build their own applications, integrate enterprise systems and access project data within Keystone. (Incite is not the only vendor to offer such a service; as part of its recent release – see post – UK-based vendor Asite also announced its own AppBuilder.)

Incite Keystone is offered on four plans:

  1. Basic (AU$15 per month per user + AU$15/month per Gb storage – that’s about £7.30 or just under US$12 at today’s exchange rates)
  2. Standard (AU$29 per month per user + AU$12/month per Gb storage)
  3. Ultimate (AU$39 per month per user + AU$8/month per Gb storage)
  4. Ultimate Enterprise

For the above, support service levels are progressively enhanced as you move up the scale.

I understand that Incite will continue its relationship with ThinkProject Solutions but will also be looking to migrate customers to its new Incite Keystone platform.

The business’s headcount has also grown, to upwards of 35 people, with further growth likely during 2009. An office is set to be established in Hong Kong and Incite is also keeping the Middle East situation under review, but it also looks likely that the company could soon be targeting Europe.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/incite-insight/

Jul 06 2009

Koenig leaves Sword CTSpace

Howard Koenig has now officially left Sword CTSpace to return to the workforce management software sphere, joining Aruspex, specialists in strategic workforce planning, as CEO (CEN story; word of his departure did, however, creep out prematurely in February). He was head of North American operations for Sword.

In the early 2000s, Howard was CEO of Citadon, which merged with troubled UK-based construction collaboration technology vendor BuildOnline in December 2006 to form CTSpace (almost the final act in a story of start-ups and mergers that burned its way through somewhere over £162m or c. $325m – see Investing in a dot.com/SaaS business: a history). CTSpace was subsequently acquired by the French software conglomerate Sword Group in December 2007 for a knockdown price, rumoured to be around £6.5m (then c. $13m).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2009/07/koenig-leaves-sword-ctspace/

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