Jul 14 2008

SaaStainability.com

Over the past few months, sustainability has cropped up more and more frequently in my posts to this blog. To be honest, the topic has also been cropping up just as often within BIW Technologies [my employer] and across the industry. There are ongoing internal conversations within BIW; the company has also contributed to the UK government’s strategy for sustainable construction, got involved with Constructing Excellence’s sustainability group, and I have been involved with events such as Sustainability Now (see Sustainability Then Again) and Be2Camp (Web 2.0 meets Built Environment – possible event), to name but two.

Over the past eight years, the BIW chief executive Colin Smith and I have also spent a lot of time talking about how construction collaboration technologies, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in particular, can play their part in helping architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and property organisations become a little bit greener (and it’s not just about paper savings). The issues extend way beyond our market sector (we’re potentially talking about the future of our entire planet, after all), so we decided to start a new blog to discuss SaaS, sustainability and all surrounding topics. It’s called, naturally, SaaStainability.com.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/saastainabilitycom/

Jul 14 2008

4Projects turnover up a third

According to a Contract Journal article, 4Projects enjoys surge in demand for IT software, the UK-based construction collaboration technology provider 4Projects lifted its turnover by more than a third to £4.4m (up from £3.218m) in the 12 months to 31 March 2008, generating a pre-tax profit of £1.145m (up from £0.553m), representing a margin of 26%.

As with last year’s results (see 4projects boosts profits), the company’s profit figure is said to under-estimate the real performance by virtue of a £720,000 management charge paid to a sister company (4Projects Management Ltd) employed to minimise the group’s exposure to corporation tax. The underlying profit figure is given as £1.9m.

At the end of March, 4Projects had 44 employees (13 technical staff and 31 employed in sales, marketing and account management), and had a wage bill of £1.5m, up from the previous year’s £1.1m (in March 2007, the firm had 32 staff).

The CJ piece concludes with the news that “Since the year end, there has been a change in ownership and as a result 4Projects is now a subsidiary of Riverside Acquisitions.”

Analysis

4Projects’ growth is ahead of the figures achieved by most other UK vendors to have reported so far this year, including Asite (see Asite finally returns to growth), Business Collaborator (Business Collaborator grows 20% in 2007) and – to a lesser extent as they are more intranet vendors – Union Square (Union Square grows 34%), suggesting that most of the UK firms in this field are doing very well, thank-you, though the growth is not all attributed to the UK market. 4Projects, for example, has just opened an office in Houston, Texas (see news release), while Asite and [my employer] BIW both have operations in Dubai and India.

Last summer, 4Projects Holdings Ltd (the parent company of 4Projects Ltd and 4Projects Management Ltd) was the subject of a management buy-out funded by August Equity, so the year’s results span a period covering both pre- and post-MBO. Riverside Acquisitions Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Riverside Topco Ltd, was formed in July 2007 and both are registered at 10 Bedford Street, London WC2, the same address as August Equity, so it is presumably just a special purpose vehicle established to run its 4Projects investment.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/4projects-turnover-up-a-third/

Jul 11 2008

Sustainability Then Again

Following my post (Sustainability Then) about the recent Sustainability Now online event, I have just received an email from Nathan Easom, one of the CMP marketing team, with a note about the marketing (“will try not to leave 6 weeks notice this time!”) and an update on the statistics.

He tells me that of 3711 people who registered, 1567 (or 42%) actually attended the event. The 17 exhibitors at the event received an average of 231 unique visitors to their virtual stands during the event.

I am sure the averages conceal some wide variations. I would be interested to know what the most-frequently-visited stand was, and – perhaps more importantly – why. From a marketing perspective, all sorts of questions spring to mind about attracting and engaging with virtual visitors – for instance:

  • Was having a well-known brand-name important?
  • Did stand design make a difference?
  • Linked to both the above, how many visitors were genuinely interested in the company and its offerings, or simply curious about what the company actually did (or just picked a stand at random to test the virtual event technology!)?
  • What promotion (if any, online or offline) did companies do before the event?
  • What types of stand content were most popular – and what was less popular? (I viewed a document on one stand that was initially almost illegible, but the Flash viewer blew things up a bit too big. PDFs, on the other hand, worked OK, as did website links – but these opened in a new window posing a risk of visitors drifting away from the event.)
  • How easy was it to communicate with a real person? (As I wrote, my online dialogue with Archetype was completed relatively promptly – not the experience of isite‘s Martin Brown on another stand – but I’m not sure the email-type channel was most appropriate; I much preferred the real-time immediacy of the chatroom tool.)
  • What follow-up activities were undertaken after the event?
  • And, of course, for those exhibitors selling products and services, how good was a virtual event for generating sales leads, and how many were converted?

From a web 2.0 perspective, Martin Brown used Twitter to contact another attendee who was online at the event but in a different zone; perhaps Sustainability Now could be more integrated with other social networking tools? One opportunity was missed: the Building discussion forums. Several attendees were registered forum users, but we still had to create our event profiles and maybe add an avatar image; why not give users the option of reusing their details and images from the Building site? (This would save time when registering; the forums might also be a source of potential registrations for future events.) Going further, why not give users the option of reusing profiles from a range of social networking tools: Twitter, Facebook, etc? CMP might also use create a Facebook event for such events – just as the recent OpenTech event did – getting an online buzz far greater than would be achieved solely through a conventional website or blog.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/sustainability-then-again/

Jul 11 2008

Asite directors buy shares

Two directors of London Stock Exchange-listed construction collaboration technology provider Asite have been buying shares in the company, according to an RNS announcement.

  • Chairman Colin Goodall yesterday purchased his first shares, 150,000 of them, at an average price of 1.80 pence, giving him approximately 0.15 per cent of the issued ordinary share capital of the company.
  • Non-executive director Gordon Ashworth also purchased 150,000 shares, but at an average price of 1.84 pence, taking his overall holding to 435,555 shares, or about 0.42 per cent (a similar-sized holding to those of CEO Tony Ryan and COO Nathan Doughty).

The Asite share price at 11am today stood at 2.0 pence.

Related post: Asite directors invest (18 December 2007)

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/asite-directors-buy-shares/

Jul 10 2008

SaaS raising enterprise expectations

Two core realities will shape Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) markets for years to come, says the latest research report (Enterprise Ready, or Not – SaaS Enters the Mainstream, costing US$1,295) from Saugatuck Technology. Saugatuck say SaaS is expanding well beyond its early low-cost, easy-to-deploy niche application roots (CRM, sales force automation and collaboration) to become a key business computing force, and one that needs to be fully integrated with wider enterprise systems:

  • Users want SaaS throughout the enterprise, whether their enterprises are ready for it or not
  • SaaS is spreading throughout the enterprise, whether the vendors – or their offerings – are ready to support and deliver what users want, or not.

According to an email forwarded to me (see also Saugatuck’s news release), the report’s key findings include:

  • SaaS continues to grow in successive waves of evolution and adoption, and its complexity and capabilities are accelerating [Saugatuck warns of “SaaS bloat” – haphazard growth and spread of increasingly-complex SaaS throughout the enterprise]. Business and technology tides are combining and could “sweep IT and business up, together and forward in ways not previously experienced”.
  • Continuous growth and innovation are core competitive requirements in most SaaS markets – especially the ability to develop and deliver frequent updates and new releases. “But there is no guarantee that even the most powerful ISVs can and will make successful transitions to SaaS,” meaning “a possible ‘changing of the guard’ when it comes to software and infrastructure providers”.
  • User acceptance of SaaS will progress to growing expectations of ever-increasing SaaS capabilities, a demand for interoperability with on-premise systems, and an expectation of customisable and more unified and integrative platforms [presumably, this will challenge SaaS vendors’ tendency towards supporting multiple customers on a single instance of their code – although many have extensive configuration capabilities].
  • As the use (and value) of SaaS grows within user enterprises, so does the need for management. Hence, SaaS providers are driven to develop and deliver ever-more-sophisticated platform, integration and management offerings. Providers are therefore expanding and improving SaaS offerings to meet and exceed user desire and demand, as well as to establish and extend their competitive advantages.
  • “‘Cloud Computing’ becomes – in a very short time – ‘Cloud Business’. It is the natural progression of SaaS, the IT utility concept, and business process outsourcing and transformation.”

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/saas-raising-enterprise-expectations/

Jul 10 2008

BIM and housing

On Monday, I had an interesting meeting with Nick Clements of New Zealand-based software vendor Bisco, who plan to “revolutionise building by changing the way information flows through the building industry”.

Bisco’s technology can extract information from various generic 3D CAD design models (ArchiCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, Autodesk Revit and – soon – Vectorworks) and then re-use it for subsequent processes such as cost estimation, specifications, planning, etc. The Bisco system, usually locally-hosted, also has a secure client/server web interface so that designers, etc can check-out and work on files when away from the office. Nick told me that they hadn’t gone for a web browser-based application, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach, mainly due to issues of connectivity on many sites.

This may be a reflection of Bisco’s initial target market: the residential sector. Looking from a UK perspective, it seems premature to be employing building information modelling (BIM) approaches for housing when BIM has yet to achieve any real penetration into bigger or more complex projects (equally, many housing projects have even yet to embrace 2D construction collaboration technologies – see my post Autodesk UK house-building research). But maybe, being comparatively simpler projects undertaken by more stable and less dispersed teams, the residential market would be a good place to start moving to BIM (there is certainly interest in this area in the US – see Jerry Laiserin’s July AEC insight: BIM Goes Residential).

This, of course, assumes that the housing market is ready to invest in technology, and the signs in the UK are not good at the moment, with many housebuilders laying off large numbers of staff this week (see, for example, Building magazine’s reports of job losses at Persimmon, Redrow and Bovis Homes, and Construction News reports of lay-offs at Barratt and Kier; my friend and Contract Journal blogger Brian Green suggests the total loss could be as many as 160,000 jobs). Firms are also shutting offices, mothballing projects and delaying planning applications.

Still, eventually the UK market will stabilise…. In the meantime, in addition to some of Brian’s other suggestions about what not to do in a recession, perhaps housebuilders and their supply chains could be looking at using BIM to streamline their operations and make themselves more competitive. When the market does start to pick up again, they will then have a high-tech advantage in being able to deliver projects more quickly and with less waste.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/bim-and-housing/

Jul 09 2008

Bentley and Autodesk target interoperability

A couple of months ago, a PR slip suggested a joint Bentley/Autodesk announcement was imminent. Well, it was announced late yesterday that the two AEC software giants have agreed to expand interoperability between their solutions portfolios:

“Autodesk and Bentley will exchange software libraries, including Autodesk RealDWG, to improve the ability to read and write the companies’ respective DWG and DGN formats in mixed environments with greater fidelity” and will support “the reciprocal use of available Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)”.

Interoperability has long been a challenge for AEC software users. The news release mentions the 2004 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study which found that poor interoperability cost US business almost $16 billion a year. And last October, McGraw-Hill Construction published its Interoperability SmartMarket Report suggesting “interoperability costs add 3.1% to a typical project budget” (see post). Not surprisingly, the move has been welcomed by interoperability campaigners such as the IAI/BuildingSMART, though the immediate impact on users will be negligible until the cooperation starts to kick-in.

Leading CAD industry watcher Randall Newton suggests the step particularly benefits Autodesk in the short-term, with a longer-term benefit to Bentley. It will also be interesting to see what other AEC CAD vendors make of the move (will it be Autodesk/Bentley versus “The rest”?). Meanwhile, Tony Tanzillo of caddzone.com is slightly cynical about the motivations behind the move – in a comment on WorldCAD Access, he says:

“the cost of the flagship products of both of these companies has remained relatively constant. That in and of itself, suggests that the two of them are targeting lower-priced competitors, in an attempt to protect their high prices.”

AECbytes analysis

Update (11 June 2008): AECbytes Lachmi Khemlani is also a little skeptical about the announcement. After putting Autodesk and Bentley’s Unprecedented Interoperability Agreement into historical context (a previously very adversarial and combative relationship), she wonders why did Autodesk suddenly start “doing the right thing?” Is it to improve its public image, or does it mark – as Tony Tanzillo sort of suggested – the beginning of an attempt to marginalise the interoperability movement and its open IFC standard? She writes:

“It is important to note that Autodesk and Bentley are not proposing to enable interoperability between their applications through the IFC but through APIs and directly working with each other’s file formats,”

and then continues:

“… while interoperability is certainly gaining momentum, this is happening more as Autodesk envisioned — through direct integration rather than a common open file format. … Autodesk will just continue to acquire companies that make supporting technologies … and directly integrate them with its products. And it seems to be no longer confining the integration to just these companies but also extending it now to its competitors.”

(Here, it would appear that Autodesk is carefully choosing which competitors it deals with. I wondered on Wednesday would it be Autodesk/Bentley versus “The rest”? and this fear is shared by others. In a Cadalyst article, Bentley and Autodesk Join Hands to Bridge DGN and DWG, the Open Design Alliance‘s president Arnold van der Weide expressed concerns. “It’s dangerous when two major players sit together and share their file formats between themselves, because it can close those formats off to the world, blocking new players from entering the market.”)

Lachmi’s final point echoes something that Ralph Grabowski wrote in May: “Is this just a precursor to something that seemed even more unthinkable earlier but does not seem so farfetched anymore — the acquisition of Bentley by Autodesk?”

Update (08 August 2008) – In a Cadalyst article, Examining the Autodesk-Bentley Agreement, ODA insider Evan Yares provides some history and ponders on the implications of the deal.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/bentley-and-autodesk-target-interoperability/

Jul 08 2008

BIW benefits from Gates effect

Sometimes as a public relations professional, you get lucky. This is what happened for me at BIW when we won a project earlier this year to provide the company’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration platform for the design and construction of the Seattle, WA, headquarters of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charitable organisation set up by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates to devote much of his wealth to innovations in health and learning aimed towards ending global inequalities.

This is one of BIW’s first major projects in north America, and was one against stiff competition from US-based providers, including a system used on the preceding parking garage project. All well and good, but then it got even better, due to some fortuitous timing. We got approval to issue the release the same week that Gates stepped down from day-to-day involvement with Microsoft. This prompted lots of Gates coverage in the IT and mainstream press, and – for a change – BIW’s media coverage was no longer solely restricted to the construction trade press. This time, we’ve had pieces in the mainstream IT press (Computing – Gates Foundation signs UK SaaS provider – and Computer Weekly – Bill Gates buys UK software) and even a jokey piece in The Times – Just like Taking Coals to Newcastle.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/biw-benefits-from-gates-effect/

Jul 08 2008

Sustainability Then

Sustainability Now was last week, so Phil Clark has been looking at the lessons learned (see my post). Overall, the two-day virtual event attracted 1,500 visitors and nearly 2,000 downloads of content ranging from video and audio to two live seminars, so from that perspective a pretty successful event. Phil agreed with me that in future events it might be better to have some themed lounges; he said there was some confusion about why time slots were allocated for pre-recorded videos; and he would have liked more international visitors.

I wonder if one reason for the low international involvement was the marketing campaign? Two or three points occurred to me:

  1. Did it start early enough? From my perspective, I was aware of the event very early in its gestation but, as the marketing guy at BIW Technologies, I wasn’t approached about BIW’s potential involvement until about six weeks before the event was due to start. This gave us little time to prepare material or to publicise our involvement.
  2. Did it tap into the Web 2.0 world enough? Phil is an active blogger and tweeter, and there was ready support from a small circle of fellow bloggers and tweeters who helped spread the word, but, again, the word began to be spread a bit late in the day.
  3. Is construction/the built environment ready for virtual events? Only last week I was in a meeting where an AEC professional asked me what a webinar was. As I have said before, many busy professionals are challenged simply to keep abreast of the technologies relevant to their particular roles and responsibilities, and newer technologies often never penetrate their daily working lives. This may be the opportunity for the Be2Camp project (with which I am involved – see post) – a chance for AEC people to learn about Web 2.0 and its relevance to the built environment and sustainability in its broadest sense (people and productivity as well as planet) – perhaps we can get Phil involved so that it’s also covered by conventional offline media (ie: Building magazine) as well as online?

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/sustainability-then/

Jul 04 2008

Newsletter gives CTSpace update

I have just been forwarded a copy of the latest e-newsletter from construction collaboration vendor CTSpace (a business with an interesting past – see related posts below). The email features an editorial from Gert-Jan de Kieviet, the company’s managing director of its EMEA operation. In it he writes glowingly about the aftermath of last year’s acquisition by the Sword Group:

CTSpace just finished the first six months as part of the Sword Group and I can assure you, it was and will remain a fantastic journey.

Being part of a leading software group has given us the opportunity to accelerate our geographical expansion. We are currently facing significant growth and great new customers in the UAE, in Eastern Europe and in North Africa, where our US colleagues have a similar experience in South America. This is confirming our role as a truly global leader in SaaS based Enterprise Content Collaboration.

In addition the Sword Group gives us access to a broad variety of skills and competencies that allow us to offer our clients certain value-added services. Being one of the largest EMC Documentum implementation partners, we are now able to deliver a whole range of integration solutions between Documentum as the internal DMS and CTSpace as the external collaboration solution: a clear win-win situation.

Among other things, the newsletter talks about Sword’s ViaNovus acquisition (see post) then lists a series of wins across Europe, including a job for London Trams, a tramway project in Morocco, a scheme for Interserve in Scotland, and projects in France, Germany, Latvia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia. It repeats CTSpace’s stats frm May; saying it has “Over 135,000 users across 11,000 projects and 22 countries.”

Related posts:

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/newsletter-gives-ctspace-update/

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