Oct 06 2006

Construction Computing Awards 2006

Nominations closed for the Construction Computing Awards (see previous post) on 15 September and voting on the final shortlists has now commenced.

UK collaboration vendors are well represented among the finalists:

4Projects and BuildOnline both feature in three categories, as do Sarcophagus (two related to its collaboration system, the other for Etenderer). BIW Technologies features in five categories, and Causeway features in eight categories (but none, it appears, in connection with its collaboration solutions).

Go to the Construction Computing Awards website (click on ‘voting’) to cast your votes. Closing date is 10 November.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/10/construction_co-3/

Oct 05 2006

What was Asite’s “major new development”?

A day after Asite‘s half-day conference in London and no clues on its website as to what "major new development" was launched at the event. Perhaps you had to be there….

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/10/what_was_asites/

Sep 28 2006

Asite interim results

UK-based collaboration vendor Asite has issued its interim results for the half-year to 30 June 2006 (view Stock Exchange announcement).

  • Asite turnover continues to slide, down 9% from £0.793m in 2005 to £0.719m this year (the full 2005 results also showed turnover down 9% on the previous year).
  • Operating losses for the period amount to £0.331m (an improvement on the same period in 2005: £0.959m) – mainly due to dramatic cuts in sales and distribution costs and administration expenses.

Trying to put an optimistic spin on things, the chairman’s statement says:

“Take up and usage of the Asite platform remains strong.  The number of users accessing the platform between January and June 2006 totals 404,604 an increase of 45% on the same period in 2005.”

I think this actually means that users have accessed Asite’s system 404,604 times – I very much doubt that Asite has that many individual users. To put this into context, one of Asite’s competitors, BIW Technologies, registered some two million logins to its collaboration platform last year (see BIW news release).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/asite_interim_r/

Sep 28 2006

Dochosting Data Management

After discovering Dochosting via Contract Journal (see previous post), I have tried to find out more about the company.

The Dochosting website is, to say the least, sketchy on details of the company, giving only telephone and fax numbers (not even an email address!); no postal address or contact names either.

From the STD code of the telephone number, Dochosting appears to be based in or near Chelmsford in Essex – according to Dun & Bradstreet, its registered office is in nearby Steeple Bumpstead, near Haverhill, Suffolk.

From the online ‘brochure’, the DDM system appears to be folders-based and delivered via the web (hosting in London, with a mirrored server in the US available as an additional security option), and DDM also offer drawing scanning and printing services. It has little by way of process management tools – seems mainly to be concerned with file-sharing for small or relatively unsophisticated projects.

Skimming through the FAQs, I learned that charging is by the project, not by the number of files uploaded, with up to ten user IDs created for each project by default. Each project folder can contain up to 1Gb of files (“this is ample capacity in the vast majority of cases,” we are told).

In short, Dochosting is a small-time player in the UK collaboration market – not in the Premier League occupied by the likes of BIW, 4Projects, etc. Probably OK for simple projects undertaken by small teams.

(By the way, the photograph used on the DDM website and on the cover of its ‘brochure’ show a grey-suited, blue-hard-hat-wearing man identical to the man on the left on Business Collaborator’s website home page. Either this man uses both systems, or – more likely – both companies used photo-library images from the same session. What a coincidence!)

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/dochosting_data/

Sep 28 2006

Contract Journal feature on online collaboration

UK weekly Contract Journal has published a feature on online collaboration, written by Rebecca Froley. This mentions the findings of the NCCTP market research and links to the NCCTP website.

Unfortunately, only half the NCCTP members are mentioned by name (no links or reference to two of the UK market’s major players BIW Technologies or Business Collaborator, or to Aconex, Cadweb or Sarcophagus). There is, however, a link to three non-NCCTP members BuildOnline, Microsoft SharePoint and Dochosting Data Management – a drawing management-type system developed by a reprographics business – and two links to 4Projects, one courtesy of 4Ps’ tie-up with Contract Journal (CJcollaboration).

Rebecca concludes by asking for more information about the state of collaboration in the UK construction industry:

So, is the tide turning for on-line collaboration within the construction sector? Have you used on-line collaboration tools? Have they helped, or hindered your business? If you’ve never experimented with the technology, what put you off? The cost, concerns about managing changes to working practices, or just the difficulty of knowing how to start choosing the right solution to meet your company’s needs? Perhaps you are just starting to implement a collaboration system for the first time. Contract Journal would like to know about your experiences.

E-mail rebecca.froley@rbi.co.uk with your comments. We hope to publish some of the findings on-line at www.contractjournal.com in about a month’s time.

I have highlighted this article in case readers of this blog don’t see the CJ article – if you’ve got views, why not email Rebecca so that the proposed online feedback represents a good cross-section of opinions.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/contract_journa/

Sep 27 2006

Extranet Evolution – a year old

Looking back at what I was doing 12 months ago, I have just realised that this blog is now been in existence for over a year (my first post was on 15 September 2005).

In the first full month (October 2005), according to my StatCounter.com stats, there were a very modest 317 page-loads by 155 unique visitors. Since then numbers have climbed, despite this being mainly devoted to a very specialist field (construction collaboration technologies, aka ‘extranets’). Peak month to date was June 2006 with 2,069 page-loads by 1,049 unique visitors, and over the past four months, the number of unique visitors has averaged over 1,000/month.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/extranet_evolut/

Sep 27 2006

CIO skepticism

From SaaScon, a US conference on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Phil Wainewright has been blogging about CIO Skepticism. The CIOs participating in a conference session were apparently dismissive of some SaaS vendor claims, and judged SaaS propositions in the same way as on-premises propositions. They also dismissed some claims:

  • It’s not any easier to implement and use. Nor should it pretend to be.
  • Vendors should stop harping on about how, if you don’t like a SaaS solution, you can just unplug it and go elsewhere. That’s ludicrous.
  • The cost model is not necessarily any better. Customers amortize upfront costs anyway.
  • On-demand vendors shouldn’t bother to portray themselves as partners in achieving business results. They’re just software vendors selling products.

Not surprisingly, some of these claims are contested by other SaaS champions in the comments section of Phil’s blog. I would add my support on the partnership front.

In my experience – marketing collaboration solutions (AKA ‘extranets’) in the UK architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) market – traditional contractors, consultants and project managers have themselves worked closely with their technology vendors to develop new services, wrapped around the software solution, that differentiate them from their competitors.

This can only be efficiently achieved if they work with the software vendor – the latter are not “just software vendors selling products”. The leading vendors also provide consultancy services, combining technical knowledge with a detailed understanding of the AEC industry (I often stress the final ‘S’ of SaaS).

Moreover, the continued competitiveness of the leading vendors’ solutions is also dependent on them working closely with their customers and understanding their constantly evolving needs. The stark division between customer and vendor, between product and service, is, therefore, inaccurate. The relationship more symbiotic, delivering mutual benefits.

tags: SaaS, AEC, extranet, collaboration, UK

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/cio_skepticism/

Sep 22 2006

Knowledge – an untapped resource

Inbetween the PIECC event on Tuesday and yesterday’s Constructing Excellence event, I attended a seminar at the RICS organised by an Oxford Brookes University team, led by Esra Kurun, presenting a study of social networks and their role in knowledge management.

It was interesting stuff. There were two case studies, the first from Bovis Lend Lease (with knowledge manager Linda Chandler talking about their internal iKonnect and communities of practice schemes, as well as the project team study undertaken with the academics); the second featured GlaxoSmithKline’s Martin Yeadon and Currie & Brown. Both case studies involved research interviews of project team members, and used social network analysis to assess how well the team managed its knowledge resources. It prompted some ideas that I may well be following up with our friends at Bovis Lend Lease.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/knowledge_an_un/

Sep 22 2006

Acrobat 8

The past week has seen Adobe make announcements regarding its new Acrobat functionality:

  • Adobe Drives Next Generation of Electronic Documents with Acrobat 8 Software
  • Adobe Expands Acrobat Family with New Acrobat Connect Product Line

Critical reaction in the AEC blogosphere and online world has been quite positive (see, for example, AECnews.com and Cadalyst – see also CADdigest’s review listing).

tags: Adobe, Acrobat, collaboration, AEC

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/acrobat_8/

Sep 20 2006

SaaS traction in the AEC industry

Back in June (see post), I discussed some provocative claims (in Randall Newton’s AECnews) from US vendor Newforma about ASP traction in the AEC sector. In a comment at the time, I expressed the hope that US providers would back up my own UK-based experiences.

Today (in Autodesk Takes Exception to Newforma’s ‘No ASP Traction in AEC’ Claim), Randall reports the views of Autodesk’s Amar Hanspal:

“I find the original comments attributed to the folks at Newforma … both mystifying and not borne out by facts. At Autodesk, we have seen our collaborative project management solutions—Autodesk Buzzsaw and Autodesk Constructware—gain significant traction. This month, for instance, we clocked our 185,000th paying user.”

By coincidence, the NCCTP (UK construction collaboration vendors group) has been trying to estimate the total UK user base of its members solutions. As some vendors can be quite protective of such statistics, it has not been an easy task, but with the assistance of the independent secretariat to collate and ‘anonymise’ the figures, we are making some headway (at last week’s marketing meeting, just three vendors’ stats indicated a combined UK user base of their solutions of almost 150,000, drawn from over 18,000 different organisations)

As always, some allowances need to be made; for example, we have to allow for those users which use two or more solutions; and, while some vendors (eg: BIW Technologies and 4Projects) are pure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS, aka ASP or on-demand) providers, others provide both ASP and customer-hosted solutions (eg: Business Collaborator and Causeway). I am hoping to get some more figures from the NCCTP secretariat tomorrow morning as I want to quote them in a presentation on the NCCTP market research to the Constructing Excellence members’ convention in London tomorrow afternoon.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/09/saas_traction_i/

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