May 17 2007

UK vendor trends

This blog has reported several times on the financial performance of the main UK vendors of construction collaboration technologies (aka ‘extranets’).

In light of recent results, I thought I would provide a quick graphical update/overview of the performance of the main UK vendors (those for whom I have some financial information) over the past four years.

The UK construction collaboration technology market is now roughly twice the size it was four years ago. The combined revenues of six firms exceed £15m; guessing at the collaboration revenues earned by some of the other vendors, I estimate the market is now worth somewhere in the region of £20m-£25m.

It is clear that BIW Technologies [my employer], 4Projects and Business Collaborator have experienced sustained growth in revenues since 2003 – all growing at similar rates. Turnover at BuildOnline UK (now CTSpace) parallelled these three initially, but then began to falter.

Asite

However, perhaps the most significant finding concerns the decline of Asite, whose turnover has fallen year after year from its peak of £1.697m in 2003 to £1.354m last year (see recent post; Asite’s turnover also includes revenues from other products so collaboration revenues will be even lower when compared to collaboration-only vendors). From being the third biggest vendor (in terms of turnover), Asite has dropped to sixth, being overtaken in 2006 by Styles & Wood’s StoreData. (BTW: I notice Asite is now offering advertising on its website. Share price today 1.875 pence.)

The rest?

What about the other UK collaboration technology vendors? As previously noted (see November 2006 post: BIW’s growth continues – but what about the others?), there is little publicly available financial information on Aconex (UK) Ltd, Cadweb, Causeway, ePIN or Sarcophagus. As “small companies” meeting two of the following criteria – annual turnover of £5.6million or less, balance sheet total of £2.8 million or less, average of 50 of fewer employees – they need only submit an abbreviated balance sheet to Companies House (reading the latest return by Aconex UK Ltd, for example, I needed a financially-qualified colleague to discern that they lost circa £330k in the year to 30 June 2006, and long-term liabilities increased by circa 35% – no turnover, no P&L, nothing to help us make a meaningful comparison).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/uk_vendor_trend/

May 10 2007

Aconex researches FM needs

Australian-based construction collaboration technology vendor Aconex has undertaken some research into the information needs of facilities managers. The survey, conducted in partnership with the Facility Management Association of Australia (FMA), got responses from 555 individuals.

You can read the full story here, but the headline findings are unsurprising for anyone working in the field of collaboration technologies (and, of course, support the business case for using electronic tools to manage data through the life-cyle of a built asset).

85% of respondents identified three critical information management issues: finding and retrieving information, collaborative information access among multiple parties, and capturing and storing information efficiently… “finding information is an area of significant cost, both in terms of time spent searching and in terms of consequential damage as a result of dealing with dated and/or inaccurate information”:

  • Only 25% of respondents can find the information they require within 10 minutes
  • 70% have worked from out-of-date data
  • A quarter of people regularly reproduce information because they cannot find it
  • Up to a third of organisations have suffered financial loss due to missed deadlines on lease renewals/agreements or service contracts
  • only 7% can find all the information owned by their predecessor

Sadly, “Email, phone and fax are still the most common methods of communication with external parties”.

  • 55% of all information a facilities manager uses is from the design and construction phases, yet 44% of facility managers stated that little of this information was available to them at handover
  • When asked: ‘How useful would it be to capture documents and correspondence into a central archive from the start of the design and construction phases of a project?’ 98% said it would be ‘useful’ or ‘extremely useful’.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/aconex_research/

May 10 2007

Latest viewers

I’ve noticed a couple of press announcements about new file viewers recently.

  • Nemetschek has released a universal viewing tool for IFCs (industry foundation classes), extending the firm’s support for IFCs (see Nemetschek news release).
  • Informative Graphics Corporation (IGC) has announced the latest release of its MYRIAD 3D/2D CAD viewer.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/latest_viewers/

May 04 2007

Asite Secure Invoicing

UK collaboration vendor Asite has released another application to support online trading (see news release).

Asite Secure Invoicing (ASI) is an e-invoicing solution that reduces the time and cost of processing invoices by at least 60%, Asite says.

This adds a further product to its portfolio, which is now spread over three areas: collaboration, sourcing and trading. According to Asite’s recent results announcement (see post), volumes through its trading platform increased by 34% last year, but it doesn’t give any breakdown by solution set.

Therefore, when comparing Asite’s turnover with its competitors in the construction collaboration technology market, we must assume that the figure includes revenues from its trading and sourcing services, as well as collaboration revenues.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/asite_secure_in/

May 04 2007

Autodesk sustainability survey at Think 07

The recent Think 07 exhibition and conference event in London was used by Autodesk as an opportunity to canvass the opinions of visitors to the event on sustainability. The results are reported by Cadalyst (SURVEY: Better Collaboration, the Right Tools and Technology are Key to Sustainable Design).

Of those questioned, 61% said that sustainability was now of great importance to their organisations:

“However, the survey pointed out, to enable the industry to design and build responsibly — and in the greenest way it can — it needs better collaboration between the different disciplines working on a building project, as well as the right tools and technology to facilitate the testing and analysis of designs for energy efficiency and the minimization of waste.”

Sustainability drivers included legislation and public demand for more environmentally sound buildings, but potential barriers include industry apathy, entrenched working practices, and cost.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/autodesk_sustai/

May 04 2007

Seeing red (2)

Further to my recent post on red-lining, Scott Mackenzie has written the promised follow-up article, including a review of four PDF-to-CAD converters.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/seeing_red_2/

May 04 2007

A look at BuildingSMART

After my day at the BuildingSMART conference in London last month, it was interesting to read AECcafe.com‘s fairly detailed look at what the BuildingSMART Alliance is doing. It’s also quite topical as there have been a few news stories about software vendors (eg: Nemetschek, Bentley) achieving IFC compliance.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/a_look_at_build/

May 04 2007

McKinsey says buy SaaS

In McKinsey says buy SaaS, Phil Wainewright summarises some research from McKinsey consultants (Time for the IT Industry to Take Notice) that presents some compelling economic arguments in favour of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): “they say that SaaS has less financial risk for buyers, is cheaper to use and yet just as profitable for vendors.”

The last point is often overlooked, as many of vendors – particularly those deploying SaaS in the construction industry – have yet to achieve significant profits. The McKinsey analysts compared the profitability of leading SaaS vendors with conventional licensed software rivals, and concluded that SaaS vendors’ lower profits simply reflect where they are in their respective growth curves:

“Although SaaS companies may be slightly less profitable than traditional independent software vendors, this is primarily a result of smaller scale … We expect the economics of online delivery to improve as the market grows.”

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/05/mckinsey_says_b/

Apr 25 2007

Asite 2006 financials

Much earlier than in previous years, the latest annual results from UK-based collaboration vendor Asite have just been released (view Stock Exchange announcement).

  • The gradual downward slide in Asite’s turnover shows no sign of abating (see previous posts on interims and 2005 results; this is not a ‘dip’ in sales, as Hemscott reports). Turnover for 2006 was down 11% to £1.354m from a 2005 figure of £1.529m. Indeed, turnover in the second half of the year was lower than the first.
  • Asite reported a pre-tax loss of £0.857m (2005: £1.409m), so a bit of an improvement there, mainly due to cuts in sales and distribution costs and administration expenses in the first half of the year.

The turnover figure places Asite some distance behind other UK construction collaboration vendors such as BIW Technologies (my employer; last FY: £4.66m), 4Projects (I recently guess-timated a last FY turnover of £3.4m), BuildOnline UK (now part of CTSpace (£2.793m – see post), and Business Collaborator (£2.35m). It even puts Asite behind relative newcomer, StoreData, which, while mainly focusing on the retail fit-out sector, still turned over £1.594m last year (see post).

Reading the chairman’s statement, I see that, at the end of 2006, Asite said it had a total user community of 24,716 users from 3,457 organisations. This is roughly a third of the totals claimed by both BIW and 4Projects. During 2006, Asite registered 5,988 new users and 676 new user companies (a BIW news release says it registered 12,426 new users, and 1149 user organisations in the same period).

More interestingly, the statement talks about the impact of its new products: Asite Workspace and Asite cBIM, both launched earlier this year. It says these new products “have significantly improved the Groups position in its markets”. This is a speculative statement, surely, about the overall product portfolio as it is way too soon for Asite to draw any firm conclusions about the financial impact of these products – particularly, the BIM product, which has been launched into an AEC industry which has yet to embrace BIM widely (see last week’s BuildingSMART post).

The Workspace product was launched on a per-user licensing model, and it seems Asite is “considering the introduction of a per user price model” for its other products too. As I have previously pointed out in relation to Workspace, this would be a brave move seeing as most competing products are priced at a flat rate per project, programme or enterprise. The argument has been that charging on a per user basis in a low-margin industry like construction may lead to project team companies discouraging participation, or – perhaps worse – getting multiple employees to share a single user login (thus diluting the effectiveness of audit trails) in order to keep costs down.

On a more positive outlook section, the chairman’s statement talks about Asite’s major clients (some of them Asite shareholders) and major contracts awarded in 2006. It also mentions a “a significant win” at the start of 2007 in Abu Dhabi: the Al Raha Beach Resort (“This project, a new city district on 6.8m square metres of reclaimed land, will run for 12 years at a construction spend of US$14.700bn.” – this was the project (to be constructed by a joint venture including Asite shareholder Laing O’Rourke) I knew about back in January when a couple of Asite directors bought shares in the company). Doubtless, this project is one factor in the increase in the group’s contracted pipeline at the start of 2007 of £5.811m (2006: £3.100m), though a single 12-year project is, of course, unlikely to make a significant impact on Asite’s 2007 turnover.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/04/asite_2006_fina/

Apr 24 2007

Google spreadsheets (2)

Last June, I blogged about Google’s new web-based spreadsheet application but bemoaned the lack of graphs, etc. The gap has been filled, at least partially. Docs and Spreadsheets now has a charting function – a bit rudimentary compared to Microsoft Excel, but a step forward nonetheless.

Tags: Google spreadsheet charts 

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/04/google_spreadsh/

Load more