Jul 07 2014

FluidCM pushes free AEC mobile tools

FluidCMLos Angeles, US-based FluidCM (Fluid Contract Manager), which I wrote about in October 2013, is releasing several free cloud-based tools allowing companies to sample its mobile-first, intuitive-to-use construction software. The FluidCM Free Tool Campaign allows contractors, project owners, and architecture and engineering teams to store up to 1GB of data with unlimited users. This will give cloud newcomers a taste of what such applications can do for them (just last week, I highlighted how US AEC SaaS specialist Procore had instigated a similar free app programme).

FluidCM’s president Don Speedie says:

“The tools we are releasing not only save personnel time, but speed up your project by digitizing the workflow. Sending files like RFIs, Submittals and posting Daily Logs digitally can save weeks on a project timeline. The system helps users understand who is responsible for processing the information allowing managers to drill down to problem areas quickly.”

Update (22 July 2014) – As part of its free use campaign, FluidCM has released a complimentary cloud-based Daily Log tool, which allows users to automatically track the weather on their projects, track key site activities like crews on site, inspections, safety and delay issues, add photos and allow subcontractors to submit reports online.

A reaction

Free construction Software-as-a-Service applications sets off some small alarm bells for me. In the early “landgrab” days of construction SaaS applications – c. 2000 – I recall some early vendors (notably Buzzsaw, which started as an Autodesk spin-off before, eventually, and after incurring substantial losses, being brought back into the Autodesk fold) offering free use of their platform to tempt early trial users (and to tempt them away from rival paid-for offerings).

Of course, the AEC SaaS market has changed hugely over the past 15 years, but – in my view – free, or very low-cost, software is not a sustainable long-term B2B proposition. That’s not to say that you can’t run a short-term campaign or promotion, but “free” applications cost the vendor, can set low/no cost expectations among users, and, in the volatile world of SaaS, open opportunities for customers to ‘churn’ across available, increasingly commoditised solutions rather than choosing the best application for their needs.

Oscar WildeThis tendency will be particularly strong in the cost-conscious, low-margin world of construction (sometimes rightly derided for cynically “knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing” – Oscar Wilde). If a product or service delivers real value, then the vendors should charge, and customers should pay, a realistic price that covers the supplier’s costs and reflects the user benefits delivered. Remember: as well as being a tool for driving customer behaviour, price also serves as a tool for managing capacity, as a quality indicator, and as a signal to competitors.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/fluidcm-pushes-free-aec-mobile-tools/

Jul 03 2014

EstimateOne to expand beyond Australasian e-tendering

Streamlining complex construction procurement in Australia could be platform for growth into other markets, EstimateOne’s founders believe.

I have been writing about web-based tendering solutions for the construction industry for around 10 years, watching what has been a slow and still somewhat gradual expansion.

By 2005, my then employer, BIW Technologies (now Conject) had launched an e-tendering solution that re-used design information collated by the existing project team, and this UK SaaS construction collaboration vendor’s efforts were quickly emulated by, among others, 4Projects, Asite and Sarcophagus. Then, in October 2007, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) launched what was, to me at least, an ill-advised attempt to create a stand-alone e-tendering platform, and it duly struggled to gain traction in its first two years (post). Other stand-alone UK solutions have also been launched – such as Asktobi (apparently due to be relaunched later this year) and Darley e-tender.

E-tendering solutions have also been developed by some non-UK-based collaboration vendors, like Australia’s Aconex, who launched Bidcontender in early 2011; and in April 2014 I described how India-based Nextenders was planning to target the UK construction market. And this ignores the bid management capabilities built into various SaaS platforms offered by north American-based vendors (albeit catering for an often less complex and fragmented supply chain than that found in the UK and former British Commonwealth countries).

EstimateOne targeting Australasian e-tendering

EstimateOneBut let’s take a closer look at another e-tendering player in the Australasian market. The ANZ collaboration sector is increasingly competitive – the former 4Projects, Asite, Conject and Newforma are just some of the firms challenging the indigenous providers (I saw Asite was recently recruiting for a Sydney-based SaaS sales executive). However, take-up of construction bid management and e-tendering by Australian supply chains is seemingly dominated by three main players: the afore-mentioned Bidcontender, Cordell (part of the giant Reed business information group) and another Melbourne-based company, EstimateOne.

Andrew RitchieMike AshcroftI talked to EstimateOne’s founders Andrew Ritchie, left, and Mike Ashcroft, right, recently. The duo – respectively, a banking industry project manager and a commercial estimator and project manager – started EstimateOne in 2008, and have boot-strapped the company to its current (profitable) position without additional investment. In 2012-13, the business turned over $1.27m and is forecast to achieve revenues of $2.15m in 2013-14.

The founders had identified that commercial subcontractors had low visibility of forthcoming project opportunities and set about creating a lead generation toolset that, for $100/month ($1000/year), would help businesses spot and then track new local/regional business opportunities and identify the successful main contractors they needed to target. Not hard-sold, simply marketed without technical jargon (eg: talk of SaaS, cloud, etc) direct to estimators, they have found a ready market, with around one in twelve of 22,000 SME subcontractors currently delivering around 85% of EstimateOne’s revenues.

From this simple beginning, they then began to target head (main) contractors who were looking to streamline and simplify the issue of tender package information to shortlisted suppliers. EstimateOne could replace the email or Dropbox-type file-sharing services that many firms previously relied on, making it easier for contractors to manage address books, distribution lists and documentation. Some 400 businesses are now regular users of the EstimateOne service, listing their project opportunities online for free, with over 100 of these then paying $3,000/year for EstimateOne’s end-to-end document issue services, which covers detailed tender dialogues such as queries and addenda.

Competing, exporting

While Aconex sought to expand rapidly overseas, its Bidcontender operation has remained focused on the Australasian market, but it is facing fierce competition from EstimateOne, which, according to Ritchie, “delayed export in order to double-down on the domestic Australian market.” As a result, EstimateOne is now, he says, “the clear number two player in this market, narrowly behind BidContender, and closing fast.”

Now, however, they are also beginning to look beyond Australia and the logical next step of New Zealand. Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of south-east Asia figure on their radar, as do UK, Europe and north America. And localising their solution for international markets does not phase them – they have already planned a Spanish version of their platform should they enter the US market, and they talked about a Chinese edition as an imminent step in the next couple of years.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/07/estimateone-to-expand-beyond-australasian-e-tendering/

Jun 27 2014

Procore launches free mobile drawing management app

Procore logoCalifornia, US-based SaaS construction application provider Procore Technologies has launched a free iOS and Android mobile drawing management application. CurrentSet by Procore helps ensure project teams work off the latest drawings, not outdated versions.

CurrentSet also helps users view, mark up and share plans across devices: iPads, iPhones, Android devices, and laptop or desktop computers. Offline work is automatically synced and updated when a user is back online.

Procore, founded in 2003, provides cloud-based construction management software, helping users manage all types of construction projects including industrial plants, office buildings, apartment complexes, university facilities and retail centre. Its drawing management capabilities, with automatic naming and numbering, have been a core part of the Procore platform and – as with the document collaboration functions of other Software-as-a-Service construction platforms – help ensure that project team members have immediate access to the most up-to-date version of project plans, reducing the time and costs involved in annotating, approving, printing and distribution of new sets of drawings. Procore CEO Tooey Courtemanche says:

“CurrentSet by Procore brings the power of Procore’s drawing management technology to everyone in the construction industry at zero cost. We want construction project teams to be able to easily experience the value of Procore’s solutions, even if they’re not ready to invest in Procore’s comprehensive project management solution. CurrentSet by Procore allows any construction professional to get real value for free, and then add Procore’s features and functionality whenever they want.”

In addition to drawing management, Procore offers a full suite of project management tools to help project teams share and collaborate on project documents, photos, contracts, directories, schedules, submittals, RFIs, etc.

My view

In an increasingly mobile-oriented market, apps to enable project participants to share real-time information updates are proving popular – I recently wrote about another Californian business, Plangrid, for example – but while some of the new apps are start-up creations, CurrentSet has the advantage of coming from a mature business with over 10 years of SaaS construction software delivery experience (indeed, it is easy to see why it offers a free service – it allows users to sample Procore’s technology, and if they like it they may look at using the wider platform).

As the UK market is moving towards building information modelling (BIM), I have reservations about the long-term applicability of mobile drawing viewing, mark-up and sharing apps; I raised this when I looked at London-based start-ups Basestone (January 2014 post) and Cadbeam (May 2014) earlier this year. While there will continue to be a need to share flat drawings in pre-BIM projects, this requirement will diminish over time as more projects deploy model-based approaches, so the smart money will be on apps that can support BIM.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/procure-launches-free-mobile-drawing-management-app/

Jun 27 2014

Asite joins other AEC SaaS players in G-Cloud

Asite logo 2012In December 2013, I reported that Viewpoint’s UK subsidiary 4Projects had been accepted as a supplier for the UK government’s G-Cloud programme. Today I learned (news release) that London, UK-based Asite has also joined the G-Cloud gang. Asite CEO Tony Ryan said:

Tony Ryan (Asite CEO)“Our appointment to the G-Cloud framework builds on our long-standing relationships providing project collaboration services in the cloud to UK government. Together with our long-standing commitment to supporting the government’s Construction Strategy and in particular the achievement of Level 2 BIM with our cBIM service, we are fully committed to the improvement of procurement in UK construction.”

The G-Cloud programme provides a route for any government ICT procurer to seek a supplier without having to go through the lengthy and laborious OJEU route. As well as 4Projects, Asite joins several competitors already in the Cloudstore, including Unit4‘s Business Collaborator platform (added in February 2012) and Conject.

Update (3 July) – Asite’s G-Cloud tweets seem to have stimulated, or at least coincided, with some G-Cloud tweets and a blog post by Conject.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/asite-joins-other-aec-saas-players-in-g-cloud/

Jun 26 2014

Valuing the UK SaaS construction collaboration market

I was recently asked what proportion of the UK market used a construction collaboration system from a particular vendor, and this led on to a conversation about the overall value of the UK market for SaaS collaboration.

It depends…

Calculating this is fraught with difficulties:

  • First, some of the smaller vendors do not publish full accounts (and even some of the larger vendors have become more opaque as their ownership has changed and reporting requirements have altered – the former BuildOnline/CTSpace and Business Collaborator operations, for example, now McLaren Software and Unit4 respectively).
  • Second, some vendors offer construction collaboration as part of a wider suite of products. In some cases, collaboration may be the main offering but revenues may also come from procurement transaction hubs – to use Asite as an example. In other businesses, collaboration may be a small part of a much bigger portfolio. Instances here include Bentley Systems and Autodesk who offer strong portfolios of AEC design authoring, analysis and visualisation tools (among other things) with their ProjectWise and Buzzsaw toolsets relatively minor contributors to overall revenues. Identifying recurring SaaS collaboration revenues in any financial reports from such firms is impossible.
  • Third, some vendors report global revenues and don’t provide a regional breakdown of where their income is generated.
  • And, fourth, not all collaboration solutions are provided on a hosted Software-as-a-Service basis. Some applications are managed on-premise by the customer, and this can also make it less transparent to the vendor if the provided solution is being used for external project collaboration or more for internal content management.

I started collating information about the financial performance of most of the leading UK providers in the mid-2000s, and I have reported regularly on the ups and downs of the various companies. Most were startups founded in the late 1990s or early 2000s so their early successes were relatively modest. This is unsurprising. The businesses had to establish a track record, overcome risk-averse construction industry attitudes about collaboration in principle and about SaaS in particular, and show they were financially stable in a technology market tainted by the 2001 bursting of the Dot.com Bubble.

Stable mid-2000s growth

However, by 2005, SaaS construction collaboration had established itself as a viable market, the revenues of most of the leading vendors were growing steadily, and profitability became the norm rather than the exception. This continued through to the late 2000s; in 2008, I estimated that seven of the most well-known firms were generating total revenues of around £24m. As several smaller businesses, SaaS offshoots of software majors, and overseas providers were also targeting the market, I ‘guess-timated’ the UK market peaked in 2008 at around £30m, but I revised this figure back down to £24m as I allowed for non-SaaS, non-collaboration, non-UK revenues, etc.

UK AEC SaaS vendor revenues Oct13 (amended)The global financial crisis and resulting recession hurt all the UK-based vendors, some more than others depending upon their exposure to certain market sectors or adversely affected regions. Growth rates – averaging around 14% up to 2009 – went into reverse, with revenues dropping by an average 7% over the next three or four years. By the time the UK construction sector began to emerge from recession, I figure the SaaS collaboration space had lost around a quarter of its value.

A return to recurring revenue growth

However, over the past 18 months, the leading vendors have all been very bullish: talk of “double-digit recurring revenue growth” (4Projects, September 2013) has been commonplace, with Asite reporting 25.6% growth in the year to June 2013 and the Conject group reporting 14% growth in 2013. Much of the ground lost during the recession has been regained, and, so, if we assume average growth in the 15-20% range, then I think the mainstream UK SaaS construction collaboration market is perhaps currently worth around £20m-£21m, and – as growth continues, buttressed by demand for web-based ‘Common data environments’ to support BIM processes – will exceed its pre-recession peak in the next year.

This figure excludes projects where teams are deploying generic cloud-based collaboration tools or file-sharing platforms such as DropBox. It also excludes the growing market for mobile point solutions, some of which – like Mobile Computing Solutions’ Priority1, or Sypro – have a SaaS back-end for monitoring and reporting on tasks such as defects management or NEC contract changes.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/valuing-the-uk-saas-construction-collaboration-market/

Jun 25 2014

MoJ selects 4Projects 4BIM

4Projects by Viewpoint - blueThe UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has selected 4Projects 4BIM model server to support Level 2 BIM across all its future development projects, the Newcastle-based SaaS collaboration technology vendor (a subsidiary of Viewpoint Construction Software) has announced.

This is a significant step by a major government department as the MoJ is one of those leading the UK public sector push towards BIM adoption by 2016. Its use of BIM on a Young Offenders Institution project at Kent’s Cookham Wood Prison is a frequently used case study in BIM circles (it also deployed a single project bank account, and a Government Soft Landings approach), achieving a 20% cost saving against a baseline comparison with similar projects (see the BIM Task Group case study for a fuller picture).

4BIM was successful in a UK Government ‘GCloud’ tender and was selected by the MoJ to provide a common data environment for their entire supply chain of more than 3,000 individuals, to produce quality COBie data to collaborate more effectively and fulfill the Level 2 BIM mandate as specified in PAS 1192 parts 2 & 3. According to the MoJ’s Terry Stocks:

“We selected 4Projects through competitive tender. We were happy that 4Projects won that competition having worked with the product before on previous projects.  The functionality 4Projects provides us means we can work together with our supply chain in a fully collaborative environment to achieve and realise the objective of delivering projects on time and on budget with much greater efficiency – one of the primary drivers of Level 2 BIM. Although collaboration tools such as 4Projects are not new, BIM has accelerated the need to understand why it is so important and we are pleased to have selected the system that will play a key role in our project delivery and asset management going forward.”

4Projects/Viewpoint MD Alun Baker says:

Alun Baker“MOJ’s selection of 4Projects’ 4BIM will most certainly clear a path for other U.K. agencies and capital project managers in their evaluation and selection of an extremely well vetted and tested  BIM collaboration system. It is a critical time for all those managing government sponsored projects with the mandate of achieving Level 2 BIM quickly approaching in 2016. We are happy to be a part of this exciting time in the U.K.’s construction history, and are proud our products are helping to deliver the functionality necessary to make a valuable impact on how key stakeholders are working collaboratively on projects, while also meeting the requirements of the regulation.”

 

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/moj-selects-4projects-4bim/

Jun 18 2014

Plangrid pushes simplicity

San-Francisco-based Plangrid is targeting the simple mobile plan-sharing needs of site-based staff, but expanding functionality.

Plangrid logoAnother player in the mobile construction collaboration market in the US is San Francisco, California-based Plangrid. I received an email late last month from PlanGrid’s chief technology officer Ralph Gootee (a former Pixar Animation Studios software engineer) telling me about the application, and we had a long chat last week.

Introducing Plangrid

The company was founded by a group of four people – two with construction backgrounds, two, including Ralph, from software engineering – and in two years has grown to a 30-strong business, with adoption driven almost solely by customer word-of-mouth (the company only recently appointed its first sales person). Take-up of the company’s technology is strong in its home city (Ralph said that of the 30 cranes he could see in central San Francisco, 28 were on sites using Plangrid), but word had also spread to most other major US cities with enterprise users in them all.

The main Plangrid competition was seen as Bluebeam, Autodesk’s BIM360 application (formerly Vela) and the March 2014-launched and newly-$8m-funded FieldLens; I asked about Aconex – which has been establishing a strong US base in Silicon Valley (post) – but Ralph said they’d never met a single user.

Ralph told me Plangrid started out as a free iOS blueprint viewing application for iPad users, and is marketed as “the fastest plan viewer in the Milky Way” (“Life’s too short to be using slow PDF viewers”), but has since expanded to incorporate management of progress photographs, punchlists (aka defects management, snagging) and, most recently, tracking and management of requests for information (RFIs). A web-based view of users’ information is also provided. Pricing plans are based on the number of ‘sheets’ that users want to share – free accounts allow up to 50, $49.99/user/month gets you up to 5000, while $99.99 has unlimited storage; some document management capabilities are also provided through a partnership with BarkerBlue. Project management also features on the product roadmap.

Ease of use

Plangrid Android drawing viewMost recently, Plangrid launched its first Android application. This currently lacks some of the features of the iOS version, but the product will quickly catch up, and enable the wider sharing of site problems across supply chains using different devices. Asked about Windows devices, Ralph said they’d found IT professionals were keen on Microsoft devices within corporates, but this enthusiasm didn’t percolate out to job sites.

(Incidentally, on the same day I was contacted by Ralph, I received an email from someone keen to find an Android alternative to “the beauty that is SiteWorks for iOS”. Sir, Plangrid may be what you are looking for….)

A big factor in its adoption has been its simplicity – “it can be used by superintendents and foreman who have not used mobile IT before” – and its ability to function both online and offline. However, this doesn’t mean the company ignores customer service: Ralph said it provides good telephone and chat support, with face-to-face support for its west coast enterprise customers. Many of its users are Spanish speakers, so the product has already been translated, allowing its use in Mexico and Spain, and Portuguese users are also supported. Plangrid is winning work in Brazil, and is also eyeing project opportunities (and localisation challenges) in Japan and China.

Keep it simple

In the simplicity respect, Plangrid is clearly part of the growing movement of mobile-first, user-friendly application developers looking to disrupt the market, capitalise upon users’ growing shift away from desktop and laptop browser-based systems, and tempt customers away from the Software-as-a-Service collaboration products that have been at the forefront for much of the past 10-15 years. Copenhagen-based GenieBelt is another in this mould, I’ve also looked at some UK-based startups (eg: Basestone – which seemingly shares some characteristics with Plangrid – and Cadbeam) and the recently relaunched SmartBuilder/ Plan2Finish, who last month announced a push into the US market from a base in Texas.

It appears Plangrid has been targeting the file-sharing market first (providing a viewer with version control and annotation tools), adding further functionality to meet more sophisticated requirements; other vendors are launching applications with the more workflow capabilities built into their applications from the outset. The latter approach may satisfy users with previous experience of using browser-based SaaS AEC applications who want process support, while Plangrid’s strategy will plainly meet the needs of users who, to start with, simply want to share and collaborate upon drawing files.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/plangrid-pushes-simplicity/

Jun 13 2014

Kykloud gets Royal invitation

kykloud-logoEd Bartlett, CEO and co-founder of Kykloud, vendor of SaaS mobile surveying and condition assessment tools for the surveying and construction industry, joined other leading UK technology businesses at Tech at the Palace, a gathering of digital entrepreneurs held at Buckingham Palace earlier this week. The London event, highlighting the rising contribution of technology firms to UK employment and export opportunities, was hosted by The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh and The Duke of York.

Kykloud, set up in 2011 by Ed and Nick Graham (post), now employs 16, boasts several of the UK’s top surveying businesses amongst its clients, and last month launched Kykloud ANZ – a dedicated business division focussed on Australasia and New Zealand (post). Ed said:

Ed at the Palace“It is great to see members of the Royal household taking a genuine interest in UK technology industry and its contribution to the economy. Whilst I appreciate some of the technology on show may have been unfamiliar to them, they seemed to have a real interest in what it was we do and the opportunities technology businesses present, asking pertinent questions and getting hands-on involved in some product demonstrations.”

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/kykloud-gets-royal-invitation/

Jun 06 2014

Corecon releases iOS app

Corecon Punchlist on iOS tabletCorecon logoFour months after releasing an Android app (post), California-based web-based construction software provider Corecon Technologies has released Corecon Mobile for Apple’s iPhone and iPad. enabling mobile access for iOS users to Corecon V7 online estimating, project management and job cost suite.

Field staff can take progress photos, update checklist or punchlist items or import contacts directly from their mobile device.  Apple’s speech-to-text can also be used with the new app to transcribe voice dictation into text whenever it may be inconvenient to text. Daily logs or timecards entered directly in the iPhone/iPad app will immediately appear in Corecon V7.

Corecon President Norman Wendl says:

Norman Wendl“Mobility from jobsite to office is commonplace in the construction industry, and smartphones and tablets provide construction professionals with convenient, on-the- go computing ability no matter their location. With the release of the Corecon Mobile app for iPhone/iPad, project team members can reach an advanced level of real-time project management by enjoying the full capabilities of their more portable smartphone and tablet devices.”

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/corecon-releases-ios-app/

Jun 06 2014

Asia-Pacific hosting for Viewpoint for Collaboration

viewpointcs-logoViewpoint Construction Software has taken another step to service Australasian customers using its Viewpoint for Project Collaboration Software-as-a-Service platform (formerly 4Projects), opening a new data centre in Australia.

The news release says this centre will “provide Viewpoint’s Asia-Pacific project collaboration customers improved performance as well as additional flexibility on their data hosting options.” Having established a US hosting operation in August 2013, Viewpoint is now deploying Viewpoint For Project Collaboration in Australia on a fully compliant Amazon Web Services (AWS) elastic cloud (ISO, SOC 1 and SOC 2, and FIPS 140-2) providing both scalability and redundancy to avoid data loss, along with consistent and reliable uptime and data access. Andy Cameron, Viewpoint’s VP Global Data Center Operations and IT says:

“The addition of an Australian-based data centre along with our current services in the UK and the US provides Viewpoint both a nimble and flexible cloud environment. It allows us to serve customers with high performance, low latency and virtually infinite scale to best meet customer demands across all the regions we serve.”

The release says “Viewpoint For Project Collaboration is a new solution“. This is debatable. In some respects it is, as – like most SaaS applications – it is regularly updated with new functionality, fixes and enhancements added to the platform. And it is ‘new’ insofar as it has a new name – however, the core application, previously branded as 4Projects, was resold in the Australian market by Milton Walters’s ProjectCollaboration from May 2012 (post), until, around a year after acquiring 4Projects in February 2013, Viewpoint opted to go for a direct sales operation through its existing Melbourne office.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2014/06/asia-pacific-hosting-for-viewpoint-for-collaboration/

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