Sep 14 2011

Construction Computing Awards 2011

Awards season is approaching and once again it’s now time to vote online in the Construction Computing Awards 2011 (the Hammers). Most of the usual suspects are up for awards in the categories relating to collaboration, along with one or two new faces.

‘Document and Content Management Product of the Year‘ is being contested by 11 firms: 4Projects, Aconex, Asite, Bentley Systems (for ProjectWise), BIW, Causeway, IFS, RedSky, Union Square, Unit4 Collaboration, and Woobius (but for its Showcase platform [post], not its collaboration platform).

Take away Causeway, IFS, Redsky, Union Square, and add Autodesk (for Buzzsaw), Cereno (nuVa Huddle) and RIB Software (iTWO), and you have a similar line-up contesting the ‘Collaboration Product of the Year‘ (this is a new category from 2010, one which I first suggested in 2006, and presumably replaces last year’s ill-advised ‘best use of social media’ category – see post).

What else is up for grabs? Well….

  • 4Projects has been shortlisted for the Superbrand of 2011 (oo-er!), product of the year, and company of the year
  • Aconex is also shortlisted for e-commerce product of the year and company of the year
  • Asite, for example, has been busy tweeting about it also being shortlisted for “One to watch” company, BIM product (for Asite cBIM), project planning product, product of the year, company of the year, and Editor’s Choice.
  • BIW, Causeway and MPS (both the latter are event sponsors) are contesting IT project of the year.
  • MPS is also up for Editor’s Choice, and among the newer names shortlisted is the MPS/Docia partnership (post), shortlisted in the “one to watch” product category.

In all, 24 awards will be made, so I expect quite a few of the above names will walk away with something from the awards dinner (tables of 10 available from £1995 ex-VAT) in London on 17 November.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/09/construction-computing-awards-2011/

Sep 12 2011

Guest post by Nathan Doughty: BIM-as-a-Service

Nathan Doughty(My blog post about disruptive ideas stimulated Nathan Doughty, chief operating officer of London-based construction collaboration technology vendor Asite to contact me with his own views, which I suggested he write as a guest post on ExtranetEvolution.com.)

Paul’s recent blog post about disruptive ideas in the construction collaboration space prompted some contemplation for me – as I respect Paul’s knowledge of our space and we often share perspectives on where we see software (and particularly Software as a Service) supporting the AEC industry now and into the future. I was surprised to see Paul’s description of the ‘BIM-as-a-Service’ idea without mention of Asite cBIM – although I was heartened to see his subsequent post about the ‘BIM Battle’ recognising Asite’s long-time activity in this space since our announcement and demonstration of cBIM in London and in Washington D.C. in 2006 and our “seeing-is-believing” demonstration with Bentley Systems in 2007.

‘BIM-as-a-Service’ is what Asite does via cBIM – albeit we are not open source as is the BIMserver project that Léon van Berlo is putting together in Holland – we deliver the service along with the software and the globally accredited platform. cBIM is not about being a BIM design platform such as Revit, Bentley, Archicad, Tekla, Digital Project, Nemetschek, etc. We call those platforms ‘processors’ because they are about processing data and allowing end-users to create or change the model.

Asite cBIM ManagercBIM is about being the library for the model information; indeed, for all project-related information. In real-life projects stakeholders use a wide variety of processors. What they generally don’t have is a central library which allows them to check data in and out and keeps track of it all. Within Asite we talk about the four ‘C’s of cBIM – collaboration, coordination, commercial, and cloud. You give project teams a central database in the cloud to maintain and coordinate the model – built on a proven collaboration platform integrated tightly with their commercial data. (There are at least three more Cs under commercial – i.e. cost, contracts, and construction management – but that just starts to get silly.)

I am a fan of the BIMserver project and I believe the intent of the model server they have begun building is to become an open-source offering similar to Asite cBIM – i.e. to host the actual BIM database centrally (allowing for versioning, model merging, etc.). This is very clearly differentiated from the belated steps toward BIM that some of our construction collaboration vendor brethren are now taking – which are very much management of model “files” – basically doing the same thing we in the construction collaboration community have been doing for the last 15 years with electronic file management – except with BIM model files.  This has a clear value of course – but is by no means disruptive in 2011.

There are other players out there in this same disruptive space – in America there is Horizontal Systems with their Glue platform who have achieved mindshare with several US General Contractors that I’ve visited. They have started up straight into this space as opposed to developing from a “traditional” SaaS collaboration vendor position. There is also Tekla who have made a lot of noise with their BIMSight offering during 2011 – and the Norwegian company Jotne EPM Technology whose on-premise EDMServer system has been in development for at least ten years.

Whilst the Asite platform is not open source – it is open data, by which I mean that we allow our users full freedom to bring data into the platform and export data out of the platform in open-standards-based data formats on-demand. In 2008 and again in 2009 we organised the virtual design competitions Build London Live which showed how upwards of 85 different software packages could successfully exchange model-related data using open standards (and across globally distributed teams)!

There are a number of examples of industries where a strong open-source offering (for those who want to run their own server and tinker) sits alongside a commercial SaaS offering (for those who just want to work with their data and leave the systems management, infrastructure, support, compliance and accreditation to others) – and the two coexist quite happily with plenty of demand for both.   The disruptiveness of the open-source model itself is – I think – a disruption that has already done its disrupting in the enterprise software world.

Nathan Doughty (COO, Asite)
email, @NRDoughty.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/09/guest-post-by-nathan-doughty-bim-as-a-service/

Sep 09 2011

The BIM battle – and some PR spin

The ‘BIM battle’ among UK-based SaaS construction collaboration technology vendors is warming up nicely. Take yesterday, for example….

First, London-based provider Asite and Building magazine announced the first of four webinars on collaborative BIM. The series starts on 28 September, with an hour-long discussion, chaired by Building‘s Tom Lane and featuring Asite’s Nathan Doughty, BIM consultant Mervyn Richards and Mark Bew, Director of Business Information Systems at URS/Scott Wilson (all familiar faces from BuildingSMART UK, among other places). As I have previously mentioned (post), Asite has been pushing collaborative BIM, cBIM, for some years, but other vendors are now trying to show they too have a long track record in this area….

For the second initiative launched yesterday was an announcement by Woking-based vendor BIW Technologies of its support for BIM, claiming:

“… a history of embracing these principals [sic] as far back as 2000 when we carried out a Joint Venture (JV) with Nottingham University creating a Virtual Reality (VR) suite designed and developed i (intelligent) components, to interpret construction products as 3D models.”

(BIW then goes on to talk about the first phase of BIM capabilities in its BIW project control application suite, enabling users to share 3D and BIM models, view and navigate these models, apply comments, and manage change processes.)

However, the history claims are a little hollow, as almost all the people involved with the i-component project left BIW some years ago; director George Stevenson, for example, has been MD of Nottingham-based ActivePlan Solutions since 2002, working alongside long-time colleague and former BIW software developer Tim Aikin. And, as development of the i-component project (see BIW 2001 press cutting) was something championed by George and Tim, that experience is more relevant to ActivePlan and has no direct connection to BIW’s new BIM capabilities.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/09/the-bim-battle-and-some-pr-spin/

Sep 01 2011

Hawthorn Glen v Aconex rematch: round one to Hawthorn Glen

According to Australian specialist news site StartUpSmart, a potentially acrimonious public showdown between SaaS construction collaboration provider Aconex and disgruntled shareholder Hawthorn Glen has been averted by a last minute settlement between the two sides.

As noted in June (post), Hawthorn Glen had demanded access to Aconex documents relating to February’s EGM when a move to replace chairman Martin Hosking was defeated amid concerns about the company’s apparent under-performance.

“Faced with the prospect of opening up its books to the courts or giving Hawthorn Glen access to previously-guarded documents, Aconex chose the latter on the day of the scheduled court appearance.”

Aconex CEO Leigh Jasper says he was pleased they were able to resolve the document access issue but refused to be drawn on the under-performance or conflict of interest issues. Hawthorn Glen, meanwhile, remains committed to getting Aconex to improve its performance, transparency and governance, so, with its lawyers now being able to pore over the disputed documents, I suspect this is not the end of the confrontation.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/09/hawthorn-glen-v-aconex-rematch-round-one-to-hawthorn-glen/

Aug 26 2011

What’s the next disruptive idea for collaboration?

I am indebted to a reader, Pierre-Alexandre Losson of Brussels-based Telio, who asked me a very interesting question about innovation:

“In my opinion all vendors are more or less providing the same toolchain, using the same techniques. What would be in your opinion the next disruptive idea that could or should be pushed in the coming years?”

Over the past decade, we have seen some different technologies come and go, and different terminologies applied (I was reminded about application service provision on Tuesday, for example – ASP is hardly mentioned now that SaaS is more widely used and understood).

Some of the changes have been slow and strategic. In the construction collaboration context, as I wrote earlier this week, document sharing/collaboration is increasingly a commodity – lots of people provide services in this sector, and the savvy SaaS vendor has applied its industry-specific knowledge to manage particular areas of workflow. US-based e-Builder, for instance, has focused on owner/operators and their needs for strong cost control and scheduling and helped push that SaaS vendor into a different niche, but that’s not exactly been disruptive, has it.

More disruptive, perhaps, has been the emergence of building information modelling (BIM). When I wrote my book six years ago, this was on the future horizon, and it has now become a hot topic in many markets, not least in the UK. This is set to change the nature of collaboration and herald a further switch away from paper-based, asynchronous, 2D design towards model-based, real-time, nD collaboration – assuming, of course, that the industry can make the necessary people and process changes to support the technologies involved.

And after a decade talking and writing about SaaS, perhaps we might also see disruptive approaches to BIM provision? Could we see BIM-as-a-Service delivered on a utility computing model, with designers and other project team members interacting with the BIM and each other via the web, with the underlying software perhaps hosted in the cloud, and even developed collaboratively as an interoperable open-source project rather than continued reliance on proprietary BIM tools? Certainly, there are moves in this direction – BIMserver.org is a leader in this field (and Léon van Berlo tweeted me about a rather nice sketchbook offer helping raise funds for the project).

Linked to BIM, I can foresee mobile tools and location-based services (eg: GIS, GPS) becoming increasingly important, and perhaps Comindware (see Monday’s post) hints at another disruptive idea for collaboration with its focus on the semantic web and an increasingly connected world where technologies interface more seamlessly – through the ‘internet of things’ (friends will know of my enthusiasm for Pachube, Usman Haque’s connected environments platform allowing direct real-time feedback from buildings to the architects and engineers who designed them and to the owners/operators running them). With carbon reduction increasingly important, such tools could provide vital insights for the whole cradle-to-grave approach to our built environment.

What have I missed? What other disruptive ideas and technologies might influence collaboration in the built environment? Let me know.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/whats-the-next-disruptive-idea-for-collaboration/

Aug 25 2011

August collaboration: a quick PR round-up

August is an unforgiving month for PR efforts, particularly in the UK. Journalists, readers and bloggers (including me – northern Spain, very nice!) go on holiday, publications miss an edition or two, or have fewer pages, and fewer people visit websites. In case you missed them, kudos, then, to these SaaS construction collaboration technology vendors trying to maintain their profile:

  • 4Projects – posting (so far) four UK news releases (M9 upgrade, Carillion, Kier Partnership Homes and a new project on their north-east England home turf)
  • Asite – told us about their new CallPrint relationship (post) – and has just blogged about its adoption of Akamai technology (something already deployed by Aconex)
  • BIW Technologies – announcing the release of a new version of its NEC3 contract management solution, embedding contract clauses, guidance notes and flowcharts into its application
  • Cadweb – forming a partnership with BIM provider Rapid5D
  • Docia – expanding into emerging markets and telling me about a new project in New Delhi, India for the Danish Embassy, with VV Architects from Chennai, local contractors and WSP Group
  • Unit4 Collaboration – announcing its parent Group half-year results; no exact details on the financials of the SaaS subsidiary amid “the ups and downs of the global economy” but MD Sanjeev Shah says the company “continues to make encouraging progress … are performing well and… have achieved our target for H1 2011.”

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/august-collaboration-a-quick-pr-round-up/

Aug 24 2011

Expanding on e-Builder

I recently talked (via Skype) with Jon and Ron Antevy, respectively CEO and President of USA-based e-Builder (in Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Florida). The company recently marked its 16th birthday, making it one of the longest-established names in the world of online construction collaboration technology solutions.

Focus on facility owners

When I met Jon at a conference in Harvard in 2006, e-Builder (formerly MPInteractive) was already 11 years old, having been founded in 1995 and Jon was already earning plaudits from US trade magazine Engineering News Record for pioneering the idea of web-based construction information-sharing (five years later, in May 2000, ENR publisher McGraw-Hill took a financial stake in the business). In the early days, Jon says, e-Builder couldn’t afford to be selective about its customers and quickly accumulated a mixture of general contractors and building owners. These early adopters helped e-Builder to become profitable by 1998, but Jon had already identified that facility owners, particularly serial builders (those building a steady succession of projects), were likely to prove the most lucrative market:

“It took about ten years but e-Builder eventually became the favoured platform for many building owners and operators, and we now have strong positions in healthcare, education and government. We now work with over 60 healthcare providers, for example, and no competitor comes anywhere close to this dominance of the owners market. We now have 100s of customers working on projects involving 1000s of organisations – and user-bases for some of these can be as high as 2,500.”

e-Builder, which employs around 60 staff (one third in software development, one third in implementation – Jon rightly stresses the ‘Service’ element of SaaS – and one third sales, marketing and administration), operates mainly in metropolitan areas right across the USA and Canada, but has also supported projects in the Middle East – typically hotel projects undertaken by US-based developers already familiar with e-Builder.

When the global financial crisis struck, the flow of projects in Dubai quickly dried up, but e-Builder did not experience a downturn in its domestic market. Ron elaborated:

Ron Antevy“We have just had the best two or three years in the history of the company. I believe the financial crisis has made owners smarter with their money. There are lower tolerances for error, and our technology and tools can help them achieve better compliance.

“e-Builder currently has around 25,000 active users of its platform, and these have helped sustain consistent revenue growth in the range of 36%-41% per year over the past three years. We expect to maintain or increase the rate of growth over the next 2-3 years.”

The competition

Cost managementAsked about competitors, Meridian’s Prolog was the first name mentioned, followed by Constructware – an Autodesk product since 2006, though Jon didn’t believe that Autodesk had followed through in the development of Constructware he once anticipated (post). I asked if e-Builder had come up against Aconex, BIW, Asite or 4Projects, all now targeting the north American market. Only Aconex had begun to register on Jon’s competitive radar, and he didn’t feel it was even a direct competitor (“yes, it’s got some robust document management, but it doesn’t have the sophisticated workflow and mature cost management functionality demanded by e-Builder customers” – e-Builder launched its first cost module in 2003). He was aware of BIW’s tie-up with Sage (though the latter’s financial management applications were, in his view, mainly targeted at small-to-medium-sized general contractors, not owner/operators), but regarded the combined BIW/conject ‘infrastructure life-cycle management’ offering as more interesting.

The conversation then turned to BIM (building information modelling) and how this might be used to meet facilities management requirements. While BIM was increasingly being included in requests for pricing, it did not yet appear to be a ‘must-have’ component, Jon said:

“Currently, e-Builder customers are typically more concerned with having scheduling and cost management functionality, and maybe a link to their ERP systems. While consultants are interested in being able to create BIM execution plans and view the model in a web browser, clients simply don’t ask for it yet. I think their interest reflects the value they perceive it offers: it just has not yet reduced risk as much as they thought it would.”

In the meantime, owners’ FM needs were largely met by providing tools that allow information from e-Builder to be used in solutions such as IBM Maximo.

My take

It was gratifying to hear another vendor talk of the value of focusing on the ultimate client, and – in particular – on ‘serial builders’. When I was at BIW, the business tried to maintain a balance between AEC businesses (contractors, consultants, etc) and their customers (the owners and operators of built assets, eg: retailers, property developers, banks, transport undertakings, etc). The latter are less prone to cyclical nature of the construction industry, and it appears e-Builder customers found its platform even more beneficial when it came to working within more constrained budgets during the global financial crisis.

Capital plane-Builder has also moved well beyond document collaboration, which has become an increasingly widely available and often low-priced commodity. Like many of its competitors on both sides of the Atlantic, it started with a focus on creating a central information repository for professionals involved in designing and delivering construction projects. However, it recognised the importance of managing more than just documents, and the extension of its functionality into detailed cost control and scheduling has reaped dividends (its 2003 cost module pre-dates the development of similar functionality by BIW by around three years). It has also sought to embrace mobile technologies from Blackberry solutions (2006 post) to iPad (10 June 2011 news release), and sees the continued delivery of workflow data via mobile platforms as an integral part of its future roadmap.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/expanding-on-e-builder/

Aug 22 2011

Comindware

Start-up Comindware is looking to differentiate itself as a provider of project management applications through its use of semantic web approaches to software architecture.

Contacted by the marketing manager of a recent start-up, Comindware, I had a look at the business’s recently created website to try and understand more about its collaborative project management software. Currently, Comindware is set to provide two Software-as-a-Service, SaaS products, both aimed at organisations engaged in project delivery (these are generic or horizontal tools, but I understand that the business is developing a library of templates for particular industries, presumably including construction):

  • Comindware Tracker, available from October 2011, is “issue, project, and process tracking and management software designed for a wide range of functional areas and organizations.” It also includes the functionality of the second product….
  • Comindware Task Management, available free as a SaaS solution and as a download (with MS Outlook integration), helps “professionally manage tasks appearing every day in the organization. Distributed as a single solution for free as well as integrated into all other Comindware products.”

As the second point suggests, I am told other products are in the pipeline, including “project management software with exclusive characteristics”. The latter include Comindware’s patent-pending semantic platform, Semantic Data Storage. Instead of being based – like most current construction collaboration technology platforms – on a relational database management system (RDBMS), Comindware software architecture is based on Semantic Web concepts that apparently allow greater workflow flexibility and the ability to rapidly process data from bigger databases.

Comindware Ltd, registered in the British Virgin Islands, is led by software entrepreneurs such as CTO Peter Volynsky with previous experience in companies such as Acronis, Parallels, and Kaspersky Labs. Judging from their LinkedIn profiles (the business also has a Facebook page and is on Twitter), several if not most of the employees are based in the Russian Federation. I will be waiting to see how the company develops once it launches its first paid-for application later this year.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/comindware/

Aug 22 2011

Project control – Unit4 targets market with BC Assure

As SaaS construction collaboration technology vendors have sought to differentiate themselves from document management providers, we have seen how some have focused on various areas of workflow (eg: contract administration, project costs, health & safety) in recent years. In the process, one or two vendors have dropped, or reduced, their use of the term ‘collaboration’, preferring compliance-related phrases such as “project control” (eg: US-based Meridian’s Prolog; UK-based BIW Technologies began to use this term a couple of years ago as it entered the US market; and I notice ePin is now using the term in a Google Ads campaign – above).

The latest example of the term’s use that I have seen comes from Unit4 Collaboration, which is using LinkedIn (“Are you interested in Project Controls?“) to invite people to a seminar next month in Reading, UK. The half-day event is being held at the town-centre Forbury Hotel on 28 September, and is focused on new functionality in Unit4 Collaboration’s Business Collaborator application: BC Assure. Working with utility client Thames Water, Unit4 Collaboration says it has developed a quality assurance module that:

“makes it easy for project and programme managers, clients and suppliers to manage the quality and compliance of projects at every stage via a secure and fully-auditable platform in The Cloud.”

 

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/project-control-unit4-targets-market-with-bc-assure/

Aug 08 2011

Another print distributor tie-up for Asite

Following the November 2010 announcement by Asite of a contract between its north America distributor and US-based reprographics firmnetwork ReproMAX (post), the London-based AEC collaboration vendor has announced a similar, related deal a little closer to home. It has signed another “major contract”, this time with Callprint, the “premier technology-led reprographic and print service provider in the UK.” According to the news release:

“the partnership will support Callprint’s customer promise to deliver value-added services to the construction sector as the industry begins to accelerate its adoption of cloud technology to improve efficiency and create greater collaboration.”

Callprint will be a reseller of Asite’s SaaS collaboration platform within the UK market through its 15 branches. Callprint will also be the European distributor for Asite via partners Electrogeloz (nine branches in France) and Goedhart Repro (10 branches in Belgium and The Netherlands).

I know from previous conversations with Asite CTO Nathan Doughty that he is enthusiastic about the VAR relationship with ReproMAX (the Callprint tie-up appears to be an extension of its ReproMAX deal; Callprint is is the sole UK member of the ReproMAX marketing and purchasing network), and Asite is looking for similar synergies.

As I noted in March, Asite expected its e-procurement engine to increase the efficiency of ReproMAX’s service delivery by automating transactions, and it can offer the same to Callprint (I did notice that Callprint also has its own File Transfer service – I wonder if this might be something that might develop further with Asite?). In return, the reprographics firm (and its mainland Europe partners) will provide an additional route to market, helping promote Asite’s cloud-based services to their customer base, and expanding Asite’s reach beyond the contacts it makes through its existing sales and marketing activities.

Update (16 August 2011) – Thanks to Joel Salus, who blogs on reprographics-related issues at Reprographics 101, I now know more about ReproMAX. Joel has provided the following clarification (and also blogged about ExtranetEvolution – thanks, Joel):

“ReproMax is not a reprographics firm; it is a reprographics industry trade group.  It is a for-profit enterprise.  Certain of its “member companies” are shareholders in ReproMAX (they are often referred to as “partner-members”).  And non-shareholder member-companies are often referred to as “associate-members.”  ReproMAX’s member population consists of approximately 70 different U.S. reprographics companies. ReproMAX also has member-companies in the U.K. and in Western Europe (Goedhart and Electrogeloz, the companies you mentioned in your recent post). …

Since ReproMAX does not own or control its member-companies, it cannot force all of the member companies to acquire and/or promote “cMAX”.  Buy-in (by reprographers in the ReproMAX member group) and promotion of “cMAX” to A/E/C customers in the U.S. will depend on the buy-in of individual ReproMAX member companies.  Some will adopt it and push it, some will not.  Some will further “rebrand” it, such as is the case with Thomas Reprographics, the 2nd or 3rd largest reprographics company in the U.S.”

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/another-print-distributor-tie-up-for-asite/

Load more