If you have visited this blog recently, you my have noticed a lack of updates. Due to pressure of other work, I was struggling to write regular posts. And a growing voluntary commitment to the …
Former UK BIM Task Group head Mark Bew, also co-founder of the PCSG consultancy business acquired by Bentley Systems in 2020, has stepped down as CEO of Bentley’s Cohesive group. The opening day of Bentley …
At an in-person London event, UK-based collaboration technology Revizto gave insights on efficiently implementing technologies. Today, Extranet Evolution is at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, attending a briefing to learn more about Revizto, …
Thanks to mobile apps such as Buildiro, Skrap and now TeekIt, London streets are increasingly busy with deliveries of equipment and materials to construction sites, large and small. In late 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, …
UK Government is aiming to make open, standardised data drive an improved local plans system. Legislation will ensure data is delivered in consistent formats, and make some data publicly available and reusable. In June, I …
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I have written in this blog before about ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). I recently rediscovered Phil Wainewright who I used to read regularly at ASPnews.com; I am now reading his ZDNet.com Software as Services blog, and I have just picked up on a great abbreviation he devised earlier this year: SoSaaS. Standing for Same Old Software, as a Service, he uses the term to describe:
"Any vendor that takes their existing software and simply delivers it as an online service … their on-demand offering will inevitably be much slower, less flexible and more expensive than rivals that have rearchitected their applications afresh for the on-demand model."
Already, Microsoft has come in for some Wainewright criticism in relation to its CRM application, and I expect they won’t the last. Other traditional software vendors will surely try to pull the wool over their customers’ eyes by applying an "on-demand hosted" label to an existing product, perhaps to buy time as they try to develop a completely new SaaS solution, but they may still face problems if they don’t also transform some of their sales and customer support processes to suit the new paradigm.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/sosaas/
Regular readers may have been disappointed that there was no Extranet Evolution update yesterday. This was not the result of a hangover arising from the BIW Christmas Party on Thursday night (though a few of my colleagues were apparently feeling slightly rough yesterday morning) – it was due to a prolonged service interuption at my bloghost, TypePad.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/typepad_outage/
Eat your CAD is a recently-launched UK website dedicated to CAD. It is edited by Karen Fugle (CAD manager at the London office of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates), with significant inputs from Nigel Davies (CAD consultant) and American Shawn Foster (engineering/CADD applications manager for the HNTB companies, Kansas City, Missouri). But the site’s material is not confined to these contributors.
Although the site was only launched last month, the team has already created a substantial archive of useful articles and links to articles from a variety of sources. Searching the site for information about extranets, for example, yields some strong opinions ("extranets equal extrawork") and advice on selecting a vendor from Nigel. Extranets also crop up in his articles on CAD File formats (for example: Is issuing drawings a bind? Part II: Collaboration: sleeping with the enemy and When is a CAD file not a CAD file?). If you have an appetite for CAD-related matters, check out Eat Your CAD.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/eat_your_cad/
The irony of it all! When I noted the name-change at Ramesys earlier this week, I was unaware that one of Ramesys’s offices was based at Grovelands Business Park, adjacent to the Hertfordshire Oil Terminal which exploded on Sunday morning and burned for three days. Owing to the disaster, the Hemel Hempstead office remains closed according to a note on the Ramesys website. RedSky indeed!
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/redsky_it_how_a/
Earlier today, I attended a meeting of the NCCTP marketing group. We reviewed our conference last month, and started making plans for the 2006 edition (probably in October this time). We also discussed our plans to undertake some market research to investigate what benefits our users gain from our various construction collaboration technology solutions. This is likely to be undertaken by Benchmark Research in the first half of 2006, with the results revealed at the autumn conference.
In the meantime, on 8-9 March 2006, the results of a study of the value of online project collaboration and management systems undetaken with the input of five technology vendors (including the UK’s Business Collaborator) will be discussed at a conference at Harvard University, MA, USA. The research was led by Burcin Becerik (who I had the pleasure of meeting last year) and was supervised at Harvard Graduate School of Design by Professor Spiro Pollalis (who spoke at last month’s NCCTP event).
Unfortunately, other commitments may prevent my attendance at this event, but I am certainly looking forward to reading about the research findings. Further details of the conference can be found here.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/harvard_confere-3/
After yesterday’s post (expanded upon by Nathan Doughty here), I tried a few web searches to find out how many users Autodesk claims for Buzzsaw.
In November 2002, Autodesk claimed to have "more than 65,000 users"; this grew to 105,000 users from 750 companies (according to an April 2005 article), then 125,000 last month (November 2005) – a figure given by Autodesk’s Carol Bartz at the recent Autodesk University (see GIS User article).
I still think such numbers need to be substantiated. Do they, for example, include users who signed up to use Buzzsaw for nothing in the early days? Does it include users who are using locally hosted versions of Buzzsaw? Are these active users or people who have been registered as potential users but who may never actually use the solution? (There was a problem with some ASPs whose user base numbers were based on the sum total of all the employees of all the companies that signed up for the service; eg: if an ASP signed up 100 customers, each with 1,500 potential users, it could claim 150,000 users even if the actual number was far less.) Perhaps someone closer to Buzzsaw, Autodesk and/or the US market can enlighten me?
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/buzzsaw_secondm-2/
At AECnews.com, Randall Newton offers a Reporter’s Notebook: A Day at the Virtual Builders Roundtable, a US event organised by practitioners for practitioners. From his notes, two items stood out to me.
First: "The general consensus regarding FTP (File Transfer Protocol) as a tool for collaboration seems to be, if you still have FTP hanging around your workflow, take it out back and shoot it. Several speakers praised the use of construction-specific content management systems. (Autodesk claims that Buzzsaw, its Web-based collaboration tool, is now the second-most widely used Application Service Provider (ASP) product, after Salesforce.com.)"
Of course, I endorse the FTP comment, but the claim by Autodesk made my jaw drop a bit. I would be interested, particularly in the context of my points last week (see US collaboration market share data), to see some statistics to support this statement. Buzzsaw may, of course, be a long way behind Salesforce.com (today the latter claims 18,700 customers and 351,000 subscribers to the three editions of its CRM application), but it would be good to know which other ASP products’ user bases Autodesk has assessed – and how – to make this claim.
Second: "You have to hit the “Three Fears of BIM” head on, says Kenig. Those fears are Legal (“Who do we sue when this doesn’t work?”), Change (“Why do we have to do it that way?”), and Betamax (“What if the technology we choose loses in the marketplace?”) The specifics of how you respond will be unique to your organization."
I liked this comment because it almost exactly echoes the fears that were expressed about construction collaboration technologies when they were first introduced (to be fair, much the same points are still sometimes made today – only less often).
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/at_aecnewscom_r/
Two reviews in the space of a week! Following the piece in QS News (see Friday’s post), I have just been shown a piece in the latest Property Week, where Ian Wall, chief executive of the EDI Group, looks at three books for Christmas.
"Paul Wilkinson’s Construction Collaboration Technologies, subtitled ‘The Extranet Evolution’, will be extremely helpful to those of us in the industry who have been subject to presentations by consultants or demands by clients to take up these technologies. It is clearly and logically laid out and not only deals with the practical application of web-based collaboration technologies but also how they can support partnering in the construction industry.
"If there is a weakness, it is that it does not look far enough beyond the construction of buildings to their whole-life maintenance and, ultimately, recycling, for which such systems provide a powerful platform. However anyone involved, or thinking of becoming involved, in such systems could usefully consult this book."
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/wilkinsons_book_1/
One of the most well-known names in UK construction IT, Ramesys, is going to disappear. To be more accurate, it will be renamed: the construction arm of the business (along with its retail and hospitality interests) will be rebranded as RedSky IT. This follows a management buy-out of the educational software arm, which will retain the Ramesys name.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/goodbye_ramesys/
About six weeks ago, I pondered on management changes at BuildOnline. Today, I learned (thanks, Richard!) that the BO website now features a six-strong management team; the non-exec chairman and CEO are now accompanied by no less than three managing directors – for northern Europe (Bob Godfrey, like the chairman an ex-i2 recruit), southern Europe and central Europe – plus the wonderfully titled ‘President Americas’.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/changes_at_buil-3/
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