Jul 30 2014

RIB Software acquires Docia

Docia - logoSome 21 months after acquiring Australia’s ProjectCentre (post), Stuttgart, Germany-based RIB Software AG has announced it has acquired another Software-as-a-Service business: Denmark-based SaaS construction collaboration technology provider Docia (aka Byggeweb) – a company I first profiled in May 2011. I understand the deal value (including earn-out) is almost €20m, and the acquisition will potentially expand RIB’s reach across Scandinavia and other markets, including the UK, India and South Africa, while adding facility management (so-called 6D) capabilities to the RIB iTWO product suite.

iTWOcx

RIB is emerging as a strong player in the construction SaaS market. In February it reported its global 2013 turnover grew 45.4% from €39.2m to €57.0m, but it reported triple-digit growth in its international operations (up 193.8% from €8m to €23.5m) and in its SaaS/cloud operations (up 139.3% from €2.8m to €6.7m). The Docia acquisition will doubtless boost both these latter metrics.

RIB software logoFollowing the ProjectCentre acquisition, RIB created a solution that combined RIB’s iTWO 5D enterprise platform and ProjectCentre. Launched in June 2013, iTWO Collaboration Exchange (iTWOcx) offers tools covering pre-contract and design through to construction cost control and progress reporting, marking a shift from document collaboration to cloud-based management of all project-related data throughout the design, engineering and construction process. ProjectCentre had already differentiated itself by providing ERP-type functionality to its customers and iTWOcx incorporated capabilities from RIB’s application to heighten this differentiation further.

(The convergence of SaaS-based construction collaboration and construction ERP is happening across several companies. Over the past year, I have discussed similar developments relating to 4Projects/Viewpoint, Asite, Unit4 and Conject.)

RIB and Docia to target FM

Initially, it might appear that RIB has acquired another business similar to ProjectCentre, but Docia’s geographical sphere of operations is different, and its products extend beyond the current collaboration/ERP data capabilities of iTWOcx.

Docia, founded in 1997, grew into a consistently profitable Software-as-a-Service business turning over £3m per annum by 2011, with most of its revenues secured from projects in Scandinavia. It then began to expand internationally opening offices in South Africa (May 2011), India (October 2011), Poland and the UK, where it has also looked to exploit its Scandinavian BIM expertise (July 2013) and mobile applications. With over 100,000 users across 20 countries, it is also a strong player in the cloud-based facilities management or infrastructure lifecycle management (ILM) market, and this appears to be the prime justification for RIB’s move.

RIB describes Docia, among other things, as Scandinavia’s leading provider of cloud based facility management, and believes Docia will help it expand its iTWO Big Data platform to support model-based facility management processes (dubbed 6D) as well, providing a service managing “quality, time, and cost for investment and maintenance at a virtual level before starting with the actual building work and to support the usage of a building after its completion on an end-to-end basis in the cloud.” Dr. Hans-Peter Sanio, CTO of RIB Software AG says:

With our iTWO 6D Big Data cloud platform our customers are able to handle Project- and Facility Management processes online and make decisions in real time. The access to the data and their processing takes place via desktop applications in the browser or over mobile apps such as our iTWO 6D Control Tower app for project and maintenance controlling or Docia’s Quick capture app to record onsite defects for quality assurance and inspections on smartphones and tablets.

This move will particularly interest the UK-German SaaS provider Conject which already has a cloud-based FM solution serving mainland Europe customers and has been gearing up to launch it in the English-speaking market (see February 2014 post).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/rib-software-acquires-docia/

Jul 22 2014

New chairman at Aconex

Aconex logo 2014AconexAdam Lewis (Aconex chair 2014), the Melbourne, Australia-based SaaS construction collaboration technology provider, has appointed a new chairman. Simon Yencken, who succeeded the then embattled Martin Hosking in June 2011, has stepped down (but will remain a director) and Adam Lewis (right), a non-executive director since November 2011, is the new chairman.

Today’s boardroom reshuffle announcement has also seen Keith Geeslin, a partner at Aconex investor Francisco Partners, elected as a director in place of his Francisco colleague Petri Oksanen who had served on the Aconex board since 2012.

The company was rumoured last week to be preparing to float on the Australian Stock Exchange.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/new-chairman-at-aconex/

Jul 22 2014

Help Brok with some BIM quotes …

I have a BuildingSMART contact, Brok Howard (he’s @Brokhoward on Twitter), at HOK in the USA, who was looking for some designers’ views on how the UK AEC sector is moving from paper to full digital model delivery.

He asked me about views expressed by speakers at recent conferences (for example, I attended ThinkBIM in Leeds on 9 July, a HP BIM event at the RIBA in London last week, and a Constructing Excellence event on asset management last month), and I thought I would share the “casual, shoot from the hip perspectives” (many of them Twitter soundbites) I quoted….

When do you think the professional standard of care will require design professionals to provide 3D models for all individual scope instead of paper 2D drawings? Full BIM and only models.

  • “Project life doesn’t start when you appoint an architect … you need to make a business case first”
  • “For those working in the public sector (and private sector clients adopting the UK government BIM approach), it will be 2016.”
  • “Defining deliverables at the outset helps you plan your future data needs. … BIM execution starts ‘at the end’, with consideration of the asset’s future use (OpEx)”
  • “BIM is not just 3D, or 4D (sequencing) or 5D (cost), but 6D – it includes asset operations.”
  • “Our BIM standards are still work in progress. The picture will be clearer by March 2015.”


What are the major challenges design professionals face in this transition?

  • “Getting support from the top – if processes fail to get embedded, users soon revert to 2D and workloads grow.”
  • “Challenges include a poor understanding of company BIM capabilities, regional differences in these, and continuously developing BIM strategies”
  • “Trusting the data is a challenge to some businesses.”
  • “Let’s have a single shared project objective. Collaboration is about having the same objective – it’s not a process.”
  • “Poor interoperability is a major factor. Autodesk and Bentley don’t help.”

What opportunities do you see opening up when contracts required modeling from everyone on a design team and paper goes away?

  • “I know an electrical contractor using BIM because it makes him more productive, not because it’s going to be mandated.”
  • “If we give clients great buildings (with data), they can lead future projects that more effectively push the boundaries.”
  • “Buildings that are well constructed for ‘business’ productivity will more than offset the costs of FM, BIM.”
  • “Nobody is yet handing over asset information upon completion. The real value will be in this data.”
  • “In the context of BIM, the ability for us to provide exportable services is one of the main drivers for UK adoption.”

(If you have any more quotable quotes that might help Brok, please add them via the comments.)

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/help-brok-with-some-bim-quotes/

Jul 18 2014

Aconex to float on ASX?

Aconex logo 2014The Australian Financial Review is reporting that Aconex is preparing for an initial public offering on the Australian Stock Exchange.

The Melbourne-based SaaS construction collaboration technology vendor (now sporting a shiny new corporate identity) is said to be working with investment banks UBS and Macquarie Capital to prepare a road show for fund managers in Sydney, Melbourne and Asia, which could see the company’s shares on the ASX by the end of 2014. The story is repeated by SmartCompany, which says any such move will put it alongside technology contemporaries Atlassian and Xero.

The company was founded in 2000 by Leigh Jasper and Rob Philpott, and rapidly expanded internationally during the early 2000s, establishing offices across Asia and Europe, and more recently moving in to the north American market. In September 2008, it received a private equity injection of a AU$107.5m (then around £49m) from California, US-based Francisco Partners.

Aconex Revenues Profit/Loss December 2013The company’s fortunes were buffeted by the global financial crisis as the recession savaged the worldwide construction industry, and the company has also had to deal with some outbreaks of boardroom bickering. Revenue growth was flat for a while (see January 2012 post), and, while the last two years have seen an upturn in revenues (in the year to 30 June 2013, it reported earnings of Au$52.6m (then £28.4m or US$46.8m), its international expansion also meant the business’s losses have steadily grown.

In revenue terms, Aconex, however, remains roughly twice the size of its nearest SaaS pure play rivals in construction collaboration, and it is, arguably, the only one with a genuinely global reach.

Update (23 July 2014) – The Australian Business Spectator reports Aconex received favourable feedback from Asian investors on a roadshow this week. It did a two-day non-deal roadshow in Hong Kong, is meeting Melbourne fund managers today (Wednesday), and heading to Sydney tomorrow (Thursday). It is reported the company expects to deliver $80 million of revenue in financial year 2015, with an annual growth rate of 20 per cent, and that “Asian investors particularly like the story of taking Australian expertise global.” The IPO is slated for some time this year, but the size of the offer has not been disclosed.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/aconex-to-float-on-asx/

Jul 18 2014

SmartBuilder founder reflects on UK mobile AEC market

smartBuilder-logoWhile writing about SmartBuilder‘s closure earlier this week, I was engaged in an email exchange with the company’s founder and CEO Peter Daly about the challenges of promoting mobile applications in the UK construction market. Here he reflects on his experience over the past four years.

What are the factors in construction adoption of mobile solutions?

Peter DalyPeter Daly: I think the key thing is that this is a market that has been emerging for 14 years very slowly since the era of the PDA. While iPad and other tablet and smartphone use has increased in the sector that has not meant that in-field software has taken off.  Such use as there is is confined mainly to Tier 1 firms while early vendor entrants such as Priority1 have satisfied a lot of the very limited market demand in the UK.

We hear it discussed often at COMIT events: is mobile device use a health and safety issue for construction firms?

Peter Daly: The H&S angle is I think largely an excuse in the UK – although that is certainly not to minimise the need for safe use of smartphones and tablets. A clip-board needs no site safety assessment, but if you get too absorbed in it at height you are just as much at risk!

In the US where smartphone and tablet adoption are more widespread this is less of a problem. Certainly there is a reluctance  to buy devices – due to a lack of perceived ROI. Whether BYOD [‘Bring your own device’] can have an impact here as in other sectors (especially in the US) remains to be seen.

I think that your previous post on collaboration platforms (16 reasons why no one yet dominates the collaboration platform space, 2013) also hits the nail on the head about many common problems with the mobile space: the project-centred selling, the ‘churn’, the piloting, etc.

One key thing is that, apart from the compulsion to adopt BIM in the UK, there are not many far-sighted firms like Costain who see IT as a source of competitive advantage. In lots of other sectors, management are using IT to re-invent the business model or to compete successfully with lower costs.  There has been a huge improvement in the last five years in the UK – due in no small measure to Paul Morrell – but that embrace of BIM has not been translated into a general interest in what else technology can offer the industry.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/smartbuilder-founder-reflects-on-uk-mobile-aec-market/

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/aconex-revamps-corporate-identity/

Jul 17 2014

Newforma releases v11 of Project Center

Newforma-logoNewforma, the New Hampshire, US-based project information management (PIM) software company that offers a combination of on-premise and cloud-based document collaboration functionality, has released the 11th edition of its internally-hosted Newforma Project Center platform, offering greater integration with enterprise cloud storage platforms.

Highlights in this release include:

  • support for popular cloud storage providers, Box and Dropbox
  • data management using Panzura’s global locking file system, cloud-integrated storage solution Microsoft StorSimple, and/or Nasuni enterprise storage-as-a-service
  • integration allowing check-in/out of files via leading electronic document management systems (EDMSs): Microsoft SharePoint and IBM FileNet, and – more pertinent to the AEC market, particularly for engineering projects, where Bentley tools are often heavily embedded – Bentley ProjectWise,

I was briefed about the software release on Monday (by Marge Hart and Bob Batchelor), ahead of the news release and a London user event yesterday (Wednesday); this briefing complemented one I had in April 2014 about Newforma’s mobile and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) functionality.

Newforma opening ProjectwiseMarge and Bob stressed the improved integration of Newforma Project Center improving access to project files, leveraging cloud storage, and helping teams spanning multi-office organisations collaborate more efficiently, with powerful search capabilities across all the file storage resources (Marge demonstrated opening ProjectWise-stored files, for example). We talked about “shared folders” where authorised users could drag and drop files and do one-click downloads, the product now has an Outlook plug-in that enables users to share content to Project Center “as easily as sharing an email”, task management (discussed in April) is also improved, and the Newforma Viewer has been updated with enhanced mark-up and other tools.

Newforma’s Revit BIM add-on module has also been enhanced, using a new PDF print driver that simplifies the generation of sheets within Autodesk Revit and captures sheet metadata to streamline drawing issue.

My view

The Newforma suite plainly targets the enterprise user community, seeking to provide what it describes as a “single pane of glass” for access by dispersed team members to all project information (in Newforma, a project can be an internal undertaking as well as a construction scheme), though the enterprise focus still – to me – doesn’t expressly support project collaboration involving multiple companies (I guess this is where Newforma’s Project Cloud solution and, where appropriate, Newforma-to-Newforma come in).

Integration with other EDMSs will remove one potential barrier to Newforma adoption: that the latter isn’t integrated with an existing in-house system. The Newforma indexing and search tools can therefore be used to find and manage content in these separate secure vaults, helping provide authorised users with a more complete picture of all the information resources that are available to them – hopefully, helping reduce (or – is to too much to hope for? – eliminate) ‘silos’.

Integration with the common file-sharing applications will also go some way towards tackling the growing ‘Stealth’ or ‘Shadow IT’ issue that many corporates face – particularly with mobile users parking files in non-corporate Dropbox and similar online storage accounts – or the increasing requirement for ‘hybrid ECM’ (enterprise content management; see post).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/newforma-releases-v11-of-project-center/

Jul 16 2014

SmartBuilder and Woobius close down

smartBuilder-logoLate last month I learned that Dublin, Ireland-based Android mobile construction application developer SmartBuilder was closing down. A brief message to me from founder and CEO Peter Daly explained “Despite the promise of the new app we have been unable to source additional funding.” It appears that the company’s May 2014 effort to rename and reposition itself as a US-based Software-as-a-Service application provider, Plan2Finish, ran out of money and time. Peter is now looking to extract some value from the business’s assets (and you can still download the Plan2Finish app from Play Store for a free month’s trial).

WoobiusWoobius, one of the later arrivals on the UK SaaS construction collaboration scene (in April 2009), also appears to have closed down: the website is no longer available, and there have been three applications for the company to be struck off. This comes as little surprise: architect, company founder and serial entrepreneur Bob Leung has moved on, establishing three other businesses and in late 2013 he began applying some of his ‘simple collaboration’ learning as head of user experience and strategy at Copenhagen-based start-up Geniebelt (February 2014 post), which won $0.5m funding in November 2013.

Looking back

In the early days of UK SaaS construction collaboration (c.1999-2001), there were lots of doom-sayers suggesting that most of the dot.com start-ups would quickly fold, but collaboration proved more resilient than other online B2B ventures in the construction sector (several online marketplaces died slow lingering deaths, for example; there was, I think, just one notable UK-marketed ‘extranet’ casualty in those early years: an Israeli-founded venture called iScraper). This does not mean that they were all equally successful, however. To use a UK football analogy, a “Premier League” of leading providers gradually emerged, while there is also a “Championship” level tier of providers who support loyal long-term customers, but who compete at a product and price level below that of their more successful rivals.

The success of some of these ‘Premier League’ providers also attracted new overseas partners: Business Collaborator began its absorption into Netherlands-based Unit4 in 2008, BIW was acquired by Germany’s Conject in December 2010, and 4Projects was acquired by US ERP vendor Viewpoint in February 2013. Arguably only Asite remains as a major independent UK-owned vendor of SaaS construction collaboration. Outside the UK, other major SaaS independent pure plays include Germany’s Think Project!, Australia’s Aconex and US players such as e-Builder, but no single vendor yet dominates the global SaaS collaboration market (post).

Of course, SmartBuilder wasn’t a SaaS collaboration vendor – it had a SaaS back-end platform, but it was primarily a mobile tool for managing site-based quality management processes. This remains a highly competitive but still quite early stage market (notwithstanding the 10-year involvement, dating back to pre-smartphone days, of Mobile Computing Solutions Priority1 – post). Some of the ‘Premier League’ SaaS vendors have mobile tools in their portfolio, either home-grown or acquired (Conject, for example, bought France’s Wapp6 at the turn of the year), and there may be more M&A activity in this area as SaaS vendors look for strong mobile toolsets that complement their existing SaaS offerings.

Woobius made a virtue of its simplicity, was attractively priced and, designed by architects for architects, won some designer adoption but failed to grow as a platform for use by contractors and other supply chain members. It also faced competition from other lower-priced and SME-oriented entrants to the UK collaboration market (businesses such as Collabor8online and CloudsUK – June 2013 post), and faltered as the key man moved on to other ventures (I have long underlined the importance of a stable and committed management team). Despite interest from potential buyers, a sale could not be agreed by the remaining shareholders, and so its eventual demise comes as little surprise.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/smartbuilder-and-woobius-close-down/

Jul 15 2014

Asite partners with Nemetschek Vectorworks

Asite logo 2012London, UK-based SaaS construction collaboration technology vendor Asite is partnering with Nemetschek Vectorworks to promote the automation of workflows throughout a building’s lifecycle. The relationship, announced last week, enables users of Vectorworks Architect software to connect commercial information in their building information models (BIMs), enhance coordination processes and maintain a clear audit trail on updates to their design through Asite’s Adoddle collaboration platform. They can also share designs and individual BIM worksheets with collaborators using their chosen authoring tools through an IFC or COBie output and a cloud-based model for the project.

Jeremy Powell, director of product marketing at Nemetschek Vectorworks, said:

“Nemetschek Vectorworks is committed to promoting open BIM workflows, so we’re excited to bring Asite’s capabilities to our users, giving them the best way to coordinate the processes associated with design review, construction management and facilities management. Such coordination through Asite’s industry-leading cloud platform takes geography out of the equation for designers who work with disparate facilities managers and building operators. It also reinforces our commitment to improving communication and project coordination among design and BIM collaboration platforms, as well as our support for IFC interoperability.”

Adoddle cBIM, Asite’s collaborative BIM application, is also now accessible to Vectorworks software users, connecting model data with commercial management systems in a centralised Common Data Environment (Nemetschek launched its own centralised BIM platform, BIM+, in November 2013, having released a starter version the previous February). Asite chief operating officer Nathan Doughty underlines Asite’s and Nemetschek’s commitment to Open BIM, saying:

“If we want to achieve BIM workflows, we need collaborative yet structured input through collaborative BIM. We are therefore excited to be partnering with Nemetschek Vectorworks to connect their BIM authoring tool to our collaborative BIM platform through Open BIM.”

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/asite-partners-with-nemetschek-vectorworks/

Jul 10 2014

Colin Smith leads Textura European push

Ex-COINS, BIW and Conject executive, Colin Smiths takes the helm as Textura looks to conquer the construction payment management market in Europe.

Textura logoColin Smith, founder of BIW Technologies in 2000, CEO of that business through to its sale to Munich-based Conject in 2010, and then CEO of the Conject Group until December 2013, has a new role. He is now President, Textura Europe (a title that he says has more to do with US corporate job title naming conventions than any delusions of grandeur) of the Illinois, US-based, and New York Stock Exchange-listed, Textura Corporation.

Textura Corp

Textura is little-known in Europe (so one of Colin’s key tasks will be to build brand awareness) but has established itself in the USA as a leading provider of construction management software, particularly in the area of financial transactions. It was founded in 2004 by three Price Waterhouse partners who identified that the construction industry remained reliant on paper-based manual processes and decided to create an online invoicing and payment management platform, provided on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis: Construction Payment Management (CPM). This remains Textura’s core product.

Since this product’s launch, the company has added prequalification management, invitation to bid (in UK parlance: e-tendering), process workflow (submittal, RFI, ) exchange, take-off and estimating software, and – most recently (November 2013) – a BIM-enabled mobile and cloud solution for documents, commissioning, quality, punch list, and safety management applications, through the acquisition of Latista.

In the meantime, earlier in 2013, Textura took advantage of the improving construction economy and filed for an initial public offering (IPO), underwritten by Credit Suisse and Chicago-based William Blair & Co, and on its June debut the five million shares initially priced at $15 jumped 40%. In October the shares peaked at over $45, but in December its shares slumped after a stock commentator, Citron Research, suggested the company had misled the US Securities and Exchange Commission – something Textura strongly disputed (note: US share prices are often dogged by “short-sellers” who profit by betting on declining prices). Last week as the markets closed for the 4 July holiday weekend, the shares were trading at $24.24 – still comfortably ahead of its first day close price, and valuing the company in excess of $600m.

Textura stock price from IPO to 4 July 2014

Textura expands internationally

Treading the same route taken by Viewpoint Construction Software when it began marketing its ERP software in Australia, Textura launched an Australasian business based in Melbourne in 2012 in partnership with Minter Ellison, an Asia Pacific law firm, providing the CPM solution to Australia and New Zealand.

Having successfully localised the CPM offering for the Australasian construction market, which has inherited many of its contractual approaches and processes from the UK, Textura CEO and chairman Patrick Allin believes the time is now right to launch a European business:

“We have been meeting with prospective clients in the UK and European markets for the last 12 months and concluded that our solutions are as applicable in these markets as in North American and Australia. We understand the need for an exceptional local team that understands the particular processes and dynamics of these markets, and we are delighted to add Colin Smith to lead operations in the UK and Europe. His proven track record of technology leadership and business development from prior roles at Conject, BIW, and COINS means our European operations will be up and running sooner rather than later.”

In the Textura news release, Colin Smith says:

Colin Smith“These markets urgently require new solutions. There is a pressing need for increased visibility and control of payment applications, claims and cash-flow. European industry participants need practical tools to manage their exposure and their response to initiatives like the Fair Payments Charter and project bank accounts. I believe Textura-CPM is perfectly positioned to become the de facto standard for payment application management in Europe, as it has in North America – bringing immediate and tangible benefits to our clients. CPM functionality has already been adapted to this market based on our prior experience with developers, … contractors and construction managers in the UK and Europe.”

Colin has considerable previous experience with construction finance applications. He spent some 14 years working at Team Systems (later acquired by Misys), Mentor (now part of RedSky IT), and then CSB  (now COINS), providing ERP solutions to UK contractors, building some strong industry connections in a market renowned, even perhaps notorious, for its inertia and low investment in R&D. An astute watcher of industry trends, he identified the emergence of SaaS during the late 1990s, and, in partnership with two former Misys executives, he left COINS and co-founded BIW Technologies in 2000.

Textura opportunity

He told me he sees an opportunity for Textura to offer a solution to complement UK ERP offerings, streamlining a notorious bottleneck in construction transaction processes. While there are applications which construction businesses can use to manage estimating and project costing efficiently, he says they are less good at managing commercial dealings between main contractors and their subcontractors.

Having undertaken elements of a work package, a subcontractor has to apply to his customer, the main contractor, for payment for the proportion of the package undertaken. The main contractor will employ a surveyor to measure the work; after a process of negotiation, and if the application is agreed, then a payment will be certified. This multi-stage process – spanning several individuals spread across separate organisations – suffers from low transparency, as much of the process is currently paper- or email-based using data from internal back office systems. Often the subcontractor won’t know the progress of his application. Similarly, the main contractor and the surveyor will be managing multiple applications for payment and won’t have visibility of liabilities across all subcontractors. Textura CPM fills the gap between the different systems.

Colin will be rekindling relationships with COINS and other ERP vendors (it helps that Conject developed a project cost control module subsequently adopted by LendLease and Mace, among others, and which also interfaced with in-house financial management systems in those businesses), and as well as building the Textura brand he will need to build awareness of a new breed of construction software. He clearly has form on this – BIW helped popularise ‘project extranets’ for construction project collaboration during the early 2000s.

The timing is good. SaaS is now widely accepted for many enterprise functions (even though some in construction still prefer to manage their financial systems in-house and on-premise), and the direction of the UK construction industry is being strongly driven by a government construction strategy that is seeking to reduce costs and waste, speed up project delivery and improve efficiency. And having seen how poor payment practices exacerbated the impacts of the recent recession, there is also a desire to create fairer processes which don’t leave subcontractors out of pocket when their customers, main contractors, delay payments – almost half of all UK government projects now use project bank accounts (reported Construction Enquirer last week).

[Disclosure: I first met Colin Smith in 1999, and subsequently worked as a PR consultant for BIW Technologies before joining the company in 2000 as head of corporate communications, remaining there until 2009. I have since undertaken consultancy work for Conject.]

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/colin-smith-leads-textura-european-push/

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