A corporate merger between two UK construction businesses mainly engaged in the fit-out sector would not normally grab my attention. However, the pre-Christmas announcement that Styles & Wood is to be combined with interiors firm Southerns Group means a change of ownership for Styles & Wood’s information technology subsidiary, Nottingham-based iSite.
Central Square Holdings Ltd (CSHL) is owned by Steve Parkin, chairman and founder of delivery business Clipper Logistics, which counts some of the country’s biggest retailers among its clients. Clipper floated in 2014 and Parkin used some of the proceeds to buy into interiors firm Southerns Group in 2016. The plan is to combine this with Styles & Wood (more background – TCI article).
iSite
iSite has been a smaller player in the UK construction collaboration market, supporting many Styles & Wood customers by offering supporting information management services. As a result, its customers have tended to be industry clients with retail and office portfolios to maintain – a service iSite provided via its Portal solution. In 2012, iSite launched a cloud-based facilities management solution branded as “The Hub”, building on relationships with, among others, Nationwide Building Society and retailers Tesco, the Co-op and Morrison’s (until the late 2000s, iSite was known as StoreData, hinting at its retail connections).
The 2012 “Assetology” campaign is now ancient history, and the business – now led by former FM software executive Graham Perry (who joined iSite in 2012) – describes itself as:
“… experts in Big Data analytics. We provide cloud-based portals and mobile applications for data capture, integration and analytics to manage Corporate Real Estate, Facilities Management, Assets, Programmes and Projects. … As part of Styles&Wood Group PLC, we can provide our clients access to a fully integrated range of property support services, enabling them to enhance the performance of their property assets.”
Until a change in its reporting practices, Styles & Wood used to publicly report iSite’s contribution to group turnover and profits; in 2014, for example, it generated revenues of £1.84m (profit: £192k) – then its most successful year, and it looked to be on target to beat that the following year (see September 2015 post).
As well as the Portal and Hub solutions, it also provides a mobile solution branded as iSite Go.
Deal impact
Central Square has indicated that it “has no intention of changing Styles & Wood’s strategic plans, the location of Styles & Wood’s operations or redeploying Styles & Wood’s fixed assets or effecting a material change to the operations of the business or any conditions of employment of Styles & Wood employees”.
Update (12 November 2018) – iSite and Styles & Wood has been moved into a larger property services group called Extentia – read Building or TCIndex articles. This is a separate business to the IT business of the same name, and as well as Styles & Wood and iSite, includes a risk management software business, Arctick. The iSite website has been revamped to reflect its new parent.]
This may mean that iSite continues to support its Styles & Wood’s business activities, though its ownership by a contracting business may deter some customers in that sector from dealing with iSite. Most of the successful collaboration technology businesses have been independent of such interests (if it was seen as a non-core business, I think a disposal or a management buy-out might make its services more attractive to contracting customers).
Update (28 February 2020) – Extentia has placed Styles & Wood in administration just over two years after buying the business, blaming cash flow issues that had become too difficult to sustain (read Construction Enquirer news). The group’s Furniture, Fixtures and Equipment and Professional Services businesses were reported to be unaffected by the move, so presumably iSite continues to trade. Update (14 May 2020) – iSite and Arctick were also placed into administration as part of the collapse into administration of Extentia Group, confirms Construction Manager (4 March 2020). Update (18 December 2020) – iSite was purchased by new owner, London-based 7FC LLP in September 2020 (see tweet).
Market reaction to 
“We’ve always thought it highly likely that a major vendor with a significant bias towards financials/ERP would be interested in acquiring one of the mainstream CDE providers. I believe it’s good for the industry to understand the significance and importance that CDEs have to play in the world of digital construction now and in the future and I believe the acquisition by Oracle is a strong endorsement of this.”
“Looking at the numbers, it’s an excellent deal for Aconex shareholders, so congratulations to Leigh and Rob for delivering such a great result. That said, this (coupled with their acquisition of Textura) is an inspired deal for Oracle and clearly signals their serious intent regarding construction – which is a good thing for the industry. Existing software suppliers must take note and up their game accordingly – it’s going to be a case of have lunch or be lunch!“
“Oracle’s acquisition of Aconex in our view highlights the great potential of the engineering and construction market as well as the strategic importance of online project collaboration for the industry. It’s a very positive signal for us as the leading and now largest pure-play provider in Europe.”
“I think this is amazing for the industry that a business like this can be valued appropriately. I guess we are the last man standing from the original crowd that began this journey. Hats off to Rob and Leigh, but there is now so much more to do….”
Meanwhile, it probably helped that several former Oracle executives were already working in Aconex. At the recent Project Controls Expo (November 2017), I 
“The Aconex and Oracle businesses are a great, natural fit and highly complementary in terms of vision, product, people and geography. As co-founders of Aconex, both Rob Phillpot and I remain committed to the business and are excited about the opportunity to advance our collective vision on a larger scale, and the benefits this combination will deliver to our customers.”
At Digital Construction Week in London in October, I met up with several businesses I had previously written about – one was 
“APE Mobile is building on its strengths to provide the kind of transformational insights that contractors will depend on to win in this rapidly changing industry. We realised that all people really want is to understand what’s happening on site, and because we capture data in a unique way, we have vast amounts of rich data that can be put to good use. We started by enabling access to data, and providing simple insights, but the evolution of this will be to essentially rollback time, which has many use cases such as safety management and contract disputes.”
In some markets such as Asia, Barlow said spreadsheets are often still used to manage project controls, but customers have been looking at Aconex as it allows them to quickly adopt and deploy a solution that already has the “familiar look and feel of a spreadsheet but with all the collaboration built underneath it” (in his ‘Giga-project’ presentation later, Barlow said “the deployment time of Aconex was one thing that excited me about the technology”). He said “clients are tired of clunky, on-premise legacy solutions built on old software architecture“, and are looking for cloud-based alternatives.
Tim Olshansky has been appointed chief technology officer. He was most recently head of engineering, Americas, at Aconex. Previously he founded Worksite, provider of a SaaS project cost management solution that 
“Approximately 95 percent of global AEC businesses have fewer than 25 staff. We developed Synergy to enable this majority to untether from their offices and desks through a pure cloud software application. Synergy is designed to help all small-to- medium AEC businesses identify where they are profitable, manage their work and documentation, and collaborate with industry colleagues and clients on the same platform… without adding the significant cost and complexity found in bigger systems.”
The product is built around a core offering of cloud-based project accounting, project management and collaboration, with strong dashboards and reporting functions. It has tools to set staff rates, and to manage documents, invoices, contacts, images and timesheets and is integrated with small business accounting solutions including Xero, QuickBooks Online and MYOB AccountRight Live, so avoiding double entry of information.
