Jun 10 2013

Remembering Kalexo. Now Flashback

Launched in 2009, Kalexo looked to change collaboration approaches, and was acquired by Autodesk. Now founder Hannes Marais has a new project…

Four or five years ago, I discovered a technology start-up called Kalexo which was looking at ways to advance task management, file-sharing, online meetings and video chat online in construction (see BIM: All change please). By managing and recording information-rich exchanges such as integrated voice, movie communications and online meetings, its application Kalexo Teamwork was looking beyond mainstream construction collaboration technology platforms, which were (and still are) largely focused on file-sharing and processes. A closer look at Kalexo in April 2009 opened up my eyes to its potential to share conversations related to building information modelling (BIM) using desktop sharing and screenshot functionality.

At the time, I thought Kalexo might be leading the way in adding multimedia capabilities to existing systems, and wondered if “the BIM giants might look at incorporating similar capabilities into their platforms?” It was subsequently acquired by Autodesk, and some of the ideas behind Kalexo Teamwork are now apparent in some Autodesk products.

Flashback

Today I got an email from Kalexo’s founder and CEO Hannes Marais. He left Autodesk last year and is again looking at how multimedia communication and collaboration can be applied to the needs of professionals in architecture, engineering and construction. Savhy, his latest start-up, is focused on a video tool called Flashback. Users can share designs and their opinions on them by simply opening the tool, hitting a record button and speaking. Unlike conventional video tools (eg: YouTube), Flashback videos can be fast-forwarded and rewound, and you can use your mouse to zoom into or pan across presented materials.

The website explains:

Flashbacks are in fact animations driven from a cloud database. This allows full-fidelity viewing, hyper-fast-forward, hyper-rewind, tangential exploration, re-mixing, over-recording, online meetings, shared markup, and probably more things we have not thought of yet.  For example, … you can interact with a Flashback by pointing/high-lighting with your own laser pointer (in green), and also zoom in/out and pan at any time (we call this going on a tangent).

Flashback content is organized into lightweight “projects” with project members and a timeline of added content and recorded presentations. With all the designs and content stored in the cloud, it is easy for users to re-use existing content when creating a new Flashback.

The tool is clearly at an early stage of development, but looks promising (I have registered to get an invite to use the site). I would like to understand more about if and how:

  1. the tool might be deployed from mobile tablet devices (Kalexo had an iPhone tool)
  2. content might be shared beyond the Flashback projects platform (perhaps as ‘social objects’).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/06/remembering-kalexo-now-flashback/

Jun 06 2013

ProjectCollaboration growing 4Projects in Australia

In its first year of business, 4Projects’ Australian distributor ProjectCollaboration.com.au has gone from start-up to supporting a Au$10bn mining project.

projectCollaboration.com.au-logoLaunched in May 2012 by former Aconex and Teambinder executive Milton Walters (post), Melbourne-based ProjectCollaboration has won some significant projects in Australia and in south-east Asia during its first year of operation. As a reseller of UK-based (now US-owned) SaaS construction collaboration vendor 4Projects, it has increased customer options in the region, winning work against indigenous competitors, and apparently benefitting from both 4Projects’ ongoing BIM development and from the heightened product and customer focus of its US parent, construction ERP vendor Viewpoint.

I had an update from ProjectCollaboration MD Milton Walters this morning, and he said their consultancy-led marketing strategy had paid off:

“We are very happy where we are right now. We’re winning hearts and minds with our consultative manner, talking with customers who have identified shortfalls in current collaboration systems, while recognising that no single system will resolve all their problems.”

The company has attracted interest from customers in the Australian mining sector in particular, with several early wins. However, a highlight of the business’s first year was securing a contract with Roy Hill Holdings to support a Au$10bn iron ore mine in Western Australia – a win that has significantly raised the company’s profile, and helped dispel any notion that Australian customers will only buy Australian solutions. Another major win came in January, when ProjectCollaboration heard it had secured a contract to support the Au$700m (SGD$900m) Terminal 4 project at Singapore’s Changi Airport. Maintaining a good mix of projects is important to Milton as, in his view, the Australian mining sector appears to be slowing down.

ProjectCollaboration’s early successes as a software distributive business has also attracted interest from other international SaaS vendors offering complementary services that want to establish a foothold in Australasia, but Milton was in no rush to add new partners: “We have a strong offering with 4Projects and a stable flow of work to keep our team fully occupied,” he said (the firm now employs ten people).

Milton recently returned to the UK to attend a 4Projects user conference in Durham and believes the company’s acquisition by Viewpoint has done nothing but good:

“We have always been able to differentiate 4Projects from rival solutions by stressing its enterprise-level multi-project capabilities, its user-friendly hierarchical folders-style view of project information, and its workflow tools. However, while it’s early days for BIM in Australia, 4Projects’ investment in BIM innovation is interesting our prospects, and the Viewpoint deal has also been beneficial.

“In particular, Viewpoint has already helped 4Projects focus on product development and it is very focused on the customer user experience. This fits with our approach too – we are committed to delivering excellent customer service.”

Milton remains tight-lipped when it comes to talking about competitors in the region. Yet his business is clearly making inroads despite the apparent slowdown in the mining sector. From doing its first product demonstration in May 2012, it has already achieved some of the objectives (a diverse portfolio of major wins, plus regional projects outside Australasia) he set for the business when we spoke last August. And he thinks the Viewpoint relationship locally (the US company also operates in Australia; Scott Haladay – son of Coaxis CEO Jay Haladay – manages Viewpoint’s Melbourne office) will further help ProjectCollaboration consolidate its place in the region’s market.

In other (Australian) news…

Teambinder has moved offices; parent QA Software says it is expanding and moving to new offices on Melbourne’s north-south boulevard, St Kilda Road, putting it closer to some of its clients.

Update (24 April 2014) – Last week, 15 April 2014, Aconex announced that Roy Hill Holdings had selected its platform to support the construction and operation of Roy Hill, one of Australia’s largest integrated iron ore mining, rail and port projects, located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

This appears to be the same project previously claimed by Project Collaboration for 4Projects, but my friends at Aconex “wouldn’t comment on a competitive situation” other than to say they were “very happy to have Roy Hill on Aconex.” Similarly, 4Projects were tight-lipped about it when I raised it with them in Newcastle on Tuesday, only saying the Project Collaboration relationship was “in transition” (post).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/06/projectcollaboration-growing-4projects-in-australia/

May 30 2013

McLaren launches enterprise document control service

McLaren-logoAs briefly mentioned yesterday, McLaren Software has launched a new service, offering outsourced document control for capital projects.

The vendor provides a privately hosted cloud-based implementation (OnAir – post) of its enterprise EDMS, McLaren Enterprise, supported by experienced and trained McLaren document controllers “for a flexible, all-inclusive fee structure”. According to the news release:

…the service is designed to help owner operators or EPCs bring a document control system online quickly to support a capital project without having to procure, configure or maintain hardware or software or hire, train and retain document controllers.

The service is a response to customers finding high levels of turnover (up to 50%) among document controllers employed on capital projects, particularly where document control skills are in short supply, often in remote locations. Paul Muir, CEO of McLaren Software, says the first customer is “a major Alberta Oil Sands Operator”; the service is already available in north America and Australia with further geographic coverage and an asset operations service planned for later in 2013.

This is not unprecedented. SaaS collaboration vendor Aconex provided document control staff as part of its Panama Canal project success in 2010, and had others available for customers wanting experienced document controllers immediately. And Think Project! subsidiary PlanConnect also provides document control services (post).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/mclaren-launches-enterprise-document-control-service/

May 29 2013

4Projects reporting “double-digit” growth in Q1 2013

A first quarter trading update from Viewpoint suggests 4Projects is thriving rapidly under its new owners, with north American interest in its SaaS AEC collaboration and BIM services growing.

4projects logoA trading update news release from Sunderland, UK-based SaaS construction collaboration vendor 4Projects (now proudly “a Viewpoint Construction Software® company”; see also my March 2013 post) says it enjoyed significant revenue growth during the first quarter of 2013. The release is a little ‘light’ on details (audited results for the year to 31 March will, as usual, be filed at Companies House towards the year end – here’s last year’s), apart from highlighting a new win to support Canada’s Ottawa Light Rail Transit project.

With my usual UK company contacts apparently busy drumming up yet more business, I spoke to Matt Harris Sr, 4Projects VP and general manager and Viewpoint SVP Strategy & Corporate Development (below right), about the release earlier today. He told me:

“We finished Q1 with record recurring revenues and customer growth, and we believe 4Projects is now among the fastest growing construction software businesses in the UK. It is benefiting from growth in the overall project collaboration market, particularly outside the UK. While the UK retains our largest customer base, we are winning work in north America, in continental Europe, in the Middle East and Africa, and in Australia.* We have been enjoying double-digit growth – admittedly from a lower starting point – in these markets.
“We were seeing around 40,000 unique users of the 4Projects platform each calendar month, and the figure reached 50,000 in April. … As a result of this growth and as part of our continued investment in the business, we are currently recruiting for several key positions – in product development, technical support, professional services, and sales – for the UK business alone (and we have scores of posts to fill at Viewpoint worldwide).”

Matt HarrisI asked if 4Projects was being marketed more aggressively in the US. Matt said 4Projects’ SVP Jason Warde was “busier than he’d ever been,” and that there were currently over 20 US-based employees focused on 4Projects efforts. “We are adopting a very deliberate approach,” he continued, “and have signed up four significant main contractor businesses, which we hope to talk more about soon.” A US hosting facility for 4Projects will be up and running later this year, he added.

4Projects’ BIM tools are also proving very attractive in the US, Matt said:

“The UK is leading the world in customer-facing BIM, but BIM is also top of the minds of many of our more technology-aware contractors in the US. Viewpoint is now seen as having a very BIM-aware platform.

“We hold a major customer event annually in Portland, attracting nearly 1000 attendees, and this September we will be holding sessions on BIM and project collaboration to showcase our overall construction software solutions.”

(* I hope to be getting an update on 4Projects’ Australian operations shortly.)

My view

After the lean years of the global financial crisis and resulting recession, several bullish SaaS collaboration vendors are each claiming growing interest in their platforms. While 4Projects has been making inroads in mainland Europe, Conject and think project! have been vying for European supremacy (post), and Aconex has recently been trumpeting a series of major project wins in the Middle East (Qatar rail project), Africa (Afren oil and gas production platforms off the coast of Nigeria), London (Trocadero hotel), South Africa/Saint Helena (airport), Singapore (Asia Square) and Spain (€136.74m biofiltration plant).

Others are more quiet: McLaren Software, for example, has been acquisitive and developing new products or services (its latest is an outsourced document control service for capital projects); Unit4’s Business Collaborator team, similarly, seems quietly focused on product development; while Asite has been cementing long-term customer partnerships (with Synergy in India, and Quintain in London, for example).

If the recession is truly behind us, then we may have eradicated one of my 16 reasons why nobody yet dominates the construction SaaS collaboration sector, but there is still much to play for in this market. The revenue growth claims of the leading players seem to arise from extending the market to new customers rather than from taking market share away from competitors, and this may mean no single dominant player may emerge for some years. Simultaneously, BIM is also likely to change market requirements quite dramatically, and, in my view, those firms with demonstrable BIM data management capability, deep SaaS experience and extensive international reach are likely to become increasingly attractive to both industry customers and to investors.

Update (18 June 2013) – Viewpoint will be showcasing 4Projects at the CFMA 2013 annual conference and exhibition in San Diego, California, 22-26 June, booth 409 (news release).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/4projects-reporting-double-digit-growth-in-q1-2013/

May 22 2013

Thinking BIM and FM

ThinkBIM is helping formulate industry thinking on BIM for FM, but we need more integrated, cross-disciplinary approaches.

It is now almost exactly two years since the UK government published its Construction Strategy committing to the adoption of BIM by 2016 (July 2011 launch), and gradually the thinking is becoming more joined up.

thinkBIMOver the past couple of years, I have helped, and occasionally talked, at ThinkBIM events organised by the Centre for Knowledge Exchange at Leeds Metropolitan University. Typically, the team organise a short series of ‘twilight’ meetings held in the late afternoon/early evening, culminating in a half-day event event – combining conference sessions, workshops and rapid-fire ‘Pecha Kucha’ presentations – to round off each series (a similar format is followed for CKE’s GreenVision events, which I also help with).

Think BIM workshop session, July 2012ThinkBIM has attracted some of the UK’s leading speakers on building information modelling, as well as international contributors. For example, the most recent event, held at WSP’s Leeds office in April, included contributions from UK BIM Task Group chair Mark Bew and BuildingSmart UK’s Nick Tune, plus a transatlantic contribution from a BIM practitioner in California (Nathan Wood of DPR Construct), with all the event content freely shared online. All have pushed the boundaries of BIM thinking; the 11 July 2012 event, for instance, one of the first to explore the implications of BIM for facilities managers.

BIM for FM

This has become an increasingly hot topic in the UK, particularly as client and owner-operator organisations begin to grapple with the implications of BIM for operation and maintenance throughout the life-cycle of a built asset (the BIM Task Group now has a BIM4FM grouping). This does not mean that FM uses a fully detailed BIM for OpEx purposes. BIM “In-use” retains some project information for operational facility management (eg: a database for managing geometric, parametric performance and associated document based information), but a large amount of information is archived. This may be recalled for reference by future projects, or if necessary, be used to resolve any issues should the facility not perform as specified or designed.

Asset users can also then potentially build new data sets that combine data about the physical asset with data about energy use, human interactions with the building, etc, and these will help when it comes to developing future projects. Too often clients may look at projects in isolation as one-offs – better to think about them as a series, with early projects informing the design, construction and future operation of later ones. A key tenet of the UK Government Soft Landings (GSL) is that “BIM will be progressively used as a data management tool to assist the briefing process” – to me, this means FM will have a strategic role in helping develop future projects for each organisation.

“Now BIM?”

More difficult is WIIFM – What’s in it for me? – regarding BIM for FM in existing buildings? BIM may be deployed on new-build projects and on major refurbishments and extensions of existing assets, but can BIM help owners/managers with their existing built assets? I was struggling with this until I saw Nick Blenkarn (Severn Partnerhip) show at the recent RICS Building Conference (post) how laser-scanning and the resulting point clouds could be used to create accurate BIMs of building interiors. These can then be retrospectively linked to databases detailing assets contained in those building spaces and used for computer-aided FM.

Coincidentally, I have had two totally separate but parallel conversations about BIM and CAFM recently, both with people from software organisations looking at what they see as the real world of BIM for FM – or, as one put, it “Now BIM” – and I have also noted a push from some SaaS collaboration vendors to incorporate both BIM and whole asset life-cycle thinking into their future product portfolios.

My fellow ThinkBIM ambassador Duncan Read went to the Facilities Show at Birmingham’s NEC last week, and (in his latest ThinkBIM blog post), identified little consensus on how to ‘do’ CAFM in an integrated way with BIM. But he did spot some:

“… pockets that are realising what BIM can offer to the FM industry and they are working hard to provide that seamless link between the software solutions [though], to make this work effectively, the design and construct businesses need to engage and understand the FM needs and requirements. [And] as ever … it’s not all about the software, though as ever it will have a part to play.”

These debates will continue at forthcoming ThinkBIM events, both twilight sessions and, notably, the next half-day conference on Wednesday 10 July 2013, featuring the return of Cabinet Office GSL leader Deborah Rowland (more details here).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/thinking-bim-and-fm/

May 16 2013

Mclaren launches CAFM Explorer OnAir

The Facilities Show is at the NEC in Birmingham, UK this week (last day today) – a good place for firms to make announcements to their FM audiences. This week, for example, McLaren Software – describing itself as a provider of “engineering document control, project collaboration and CAFM (computer aided facilities management) solutions” – has announced the availability of CAFM Explorer OnAir.

McLaren-logoMcLaren acquired CAFM Explorer’s developer FMx last October for £5.6m, and in December I wrote about the company’s plans to expand the system’s web-based functionality and create a comprehensive hosted FM capability that also supports mobile working. Earlier last October, McLaren launched an ‘OnAir’ web-hosted version of its Enterprise engineering document system (post), and this week’s news is similar. According to the news release:

“McLaren CAFM Explorer ‘OnAir’ enables facility managers take full advantage of CAFM Explorer … without the need to procure, maintain or support internal IT systems.

“… The addition of CAFM Explorer to the McLaren ‘OnAir” service offers customers a choice of installing CAFM Explorer either on in house IT systems or on the McLaren’s OnAir cloud infrastructure for a single monthly fee. CAFM Explorer ‘OnAir’ users simply log onto the secure service via any supported desktop, laptop or mobile web browser.

“McLaren are also previewing McLaren CAFM Web at the Facilities Show 2013 at the NEC. CAFM Web, due for release later this year, is a new HTML 5 based interface for CAFM Explorer providing support for desktop, laptop and mobile devices.”

Environmental Resources Management (ERM), “a leading global provider of environmental, health, safety, risk, social consulting services and sustainability related services”, has been the first company to adopt CAFM Explorer OnAir.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/mclaren-launches-cafm-explorer-onair/

May 10 2013

BIM for infrastructure event from Construct IT

ConstructIT-logoAfter yesterday’s post, a timely event announcement…. Construct IT, in partnership with Network Rail and COMIT, is holding its Spring event on Thursday, 20 June 2013 in Manchester, focusing on “Deriving value through BIM in the delivery of Infrastructure Projects“. Speakers include:

  • Nigel Jacques (Network Rail) on A Client’s Perspective: Deriving Strategic Value in the Rail Sector
  • Ann Kemp (Atkins & ICE BIM Action Group) on Who’s Driving BIM – Technology or the People? An Insight into Enhancing the Quality of Thinking and Driving Better Decision-making on Infrastructure Projects
  • Iain Miskimmin (Crossrail BIM Academy) on Final Barrier to BIM: Resolving the Cultural Issues in the Crossrail Information Management Academy
  • Paul Trethewey & Andy Powell (Parsons Brinckerhoff) on Collaboration — Cross-organisation Knowledge Transfer

The event is free to members of Construct IT and COMIT (£100 for others) and is CPD accredited – more details on the Construct IT website (click on ‘events’ in the left column, or follow the Spring Event; on the following page, click on the middle icon on the right to get to the registration page).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/bim-for-infrastructure-event-from-construct-it/

May 09 2013

Learning BIM at the Bentley Crossrail Academy

The Bentley Crossrail Academy is developing and promoting BIM best practice in the £15.9 billion London project’s supply chain that will be shared by other UK mega-projects.

Crossrail roundel

Recently, Iain MisKimmin (senior industry consultant at Bentley Systems UK, manager of its City of London-based Information Management Academy, and also one of the leading lights of COMIT), invited me to attend a half-day briefing at the Academy for contractors involved in the cross-London Crossrail project (Wikipedia article*). The session was aimed at staff with information management and document control roles on the various Crossrail contracts, briefing them about the Crossrail BIM vision and what they need to do to achieve it.

Academy background

The Academy was announced in February 2012. Crossrail has an Enterprise License Subscription (ELS) for Bentley’s application software portfolio covering the extended “Crossrail enterprise”, and the Academy was created to encourage and support use of Bentley’s BIM tools and related technologies to achieve Crossrail’s goals of efficiency, cost savings, and increased safety.

Accordingly, the briefing was jointly presented by personnel from Bentley and Crossrail, who stressed the whole project life-cycle needs of the scheme (a cause dear to the heart of Crossrail CEO Andrew Wolstenholme – as readers of his 2009 Constructing Excellence report Never Waste a Good Crisis [PDF] will know; we were even treated to a showing of the 1:5:200 model), the need to capture information about virtual assets as well as physical ones, supporting collaboration and ensuring a “single source of the truth”

Supporting a mega-project’s information needs

The briefing was structured to cover:

  • document and information management
  • management and control of design information
  • asset information provision
  • BIM in delivery

At the core of Crossrail’s document management strategy is an electronic document management system (EDMS), eB Web (Bentley’s enterprise Bridge; essentially, an intranet), which is accessible across the project’s supply chain and which provides a structured and systematic approach to ensure compliance with standards. We saw the depth of metadata captured about each item, the levels of control applied to allow different levels of access (view, modify, delete, etc), red-amber-green-grey colour coding for approval status, and the search capabilities within the system.

Design information is managed through a customised version of Bentley’s ProjectWise private cloud-based collaboration platform (adapted to include more support for utilities and geospatial requirements; essentially, the project’s extranet), currently enabling sharing of CAD data in a common format among some 1500 users. In 2009, the centralised system had 92,000 items stored; by June 2013 this was expected to reach 970,000, on the way to a an expected 1.5 million CAD files – shared by 2500 users – by August 2014. Similar naming/numbering conventions and metadata structures to those specified for eB Web have been created for the ProjectWise platform, alongside standardised common folder structures.

QR codes were discussed in relation to asset management – the training room had some white, yellow and stainless steel examples fastened to the wall – but the Crossrail project involves much more. A nuclear industry standard asset information management system, AIMS, has been deployed as part of the eB system to capture data (descriptions, serial numbers, etc) and to tag assets and equipments by location, classification and function. A Bentley ‘Asset Painter’ tool is being used to link asset tag information stored in eB Web and associate them with the relevant building information model files (I’d heard Crossrail’s Ross Dentten talk about this at an Ecobuild BIM seminar in March). Ultimately some 400 classes of data will be stored in the Uniclass-based system.

BIM in Delivery looked at three broad areas, each the subject of Crossrail task groups: modelling and clash detection; mobile tools; and annotating as-built data. I was most interested in the mobile area – this month (May 2013) Bentley and Crossrail are planning to roll-out QR codes for drawing authentication via mobile devices (similar to Unit4 Collaboration, post), to enable mobile access to downloaded and synchronised portfolios of electronic files via iPads (and other devices in due course), and to implement Formotus mobile electronic forms. We were also shown how special video-pens could be used to record digital mark-ups of drawings (printed on special paper), with automatic notifications sent to the drawings’ originators upon upload.

Forward-looking

Woolwich station box, February 2013I was involved with some PR activity relating to Crossrail when I worked at civil engineering consultancy Halcrow over 20 years ago, and it is gratifying to finally see it under construction (I visited the Woolwich station box, right, during an open day earlier this year). For a project so long in gestation, Crossrail has inevitably had to bridge the analogue-to-digital divide, and some of its systems were not in place on Day One, but the Academy is helping project participants join the client on this journey, with Bentley as the technology partner and facilitator of a common data environment.

Through the Academy, the project is also keen to share its learning with other client organisations (one of my fellow attendees was an engineer from the HS2 rail project, for example), and to help its supply chain and others make the transition towards integrated BIM accessible across multiple hardware platforms, and to support the full project life cycle (the London Tube network has been celebrating its 150th anniversary and the Bentley/Crossrail team stressed that its legacy of both physical and virtual assets would need to be around for at least as long).

(* Interested in civil engineering? Interested in Wikipedia editing? Building on a previous event, the ICE is planning a day you may be interested in…. Email me for further information.)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/learning-bim-at-the-bentley-crossrail-academy/

May 08 2013

Conject CEO reclaims SaaS second place

conject-logoForget the investigations, an email has arrived from Conject CEO Colin Smith, mentioned in yesterday’s post about think project!, re-asserting the rival Munich, Germany-based group’s claim to be second largest SaaS vendor in the architecture, engineering, construction and operator space:

The answer to your question “has ThinkProject been able to overtake CONJECT?” is no.

At €17.17m [£14.53m or US$22.6m] our revenues were down, largely due to the difficulties in the FM portion of our business that we already discussed, but they were still €1.67m greater than ThinkProject for the same period. So sorry ThinkProject, nice try, but no cigar!

Looking underneath the headline figures,  gross order intake (a key indicator of future revenues for SaaS companies) during 2012 was €23.2m [£19.63m or US$30.53m] and for Q1 2013 grew even more, to €6.94m for the first three months. Our new SaaS FM product is now on full release in Germany, on-time as promised, and we have many new capabilities (including BIM) emerging from our development group over the coming year, plus several new regional offices to drive future organic revenue growth.

So to mis-quote Mark Twain “reports our our death have been greatly exaggerated” as we’ve never been in better shape!

These numbers do suggest that Conject has finally returned to growth after its flat, post-acquisition period. My own soundings had suggested that Conject had not suffered a such a dramatic dip, but think project’s German market leadership assertion may require a closer definition of what the two mean by German market and more detail of their geographical spread of revenues.

Update (16 May 2013) – I talked to think project!’s CEO Thomas Backmaier this afternoon, and he clarified his comparison. While very complimentary about Conject, he said his business’s revenues are almost solely (98%) focused on SaaS-based project collaboration, while he regarded Conject’s revenues as being drawn from a wider product portfolio, including facilities management – where some income is generated by in-house hosted (so non-SaaS) products – and cost management. In other words, he was making a distinction on a like-for-like basis.

Thomas went on to talk about recent wins in the Netherlands (major highway projects for BAM) and in Poland (a series of power plants) and said think project! had enjoyed growth of around 17% in the first four months of 2013. He was also keen to highlight the company’s development of mobile tools: Apple iOS and Android apps are being used for non-conformance reporting on offshore windfarm projects, for example.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/conject-ceo-reclaims-saas-second-place/

May 07 2013

think project! 2012 revenues reach €15.5m

think project! GmbH, grew 17 percent in 2012, to €15.5m revenues, a figure it says puts it ahead of its Munich rival Conject.

Thinkproject-logoAccording to a news release, the Munich, Germany-based project platform provider think project! has been posting annual growth rates of 15-20% for some years, grew 17% in 2012, and its first quarter of 2013 saw revenues up 16%. This growth has come equally from new and existing customers, with general contractors, energy, automotive and public sector segments the strongest drivers.

With total 2012 revenues of €15.5m (that’s £13.05m or US$20.27m at today’s rates), the release says “think project! group is now market leader in Germany and number two worldwide” (a claim that may be contested by its Anglo-German rival Conject; I believe think project! regards Aconex as current number one). Thomas Bachmaier, CEO of think project! GmbH, says:

“We are delighted with business development in Germany and internationally. In addition to these positive figures, we have been continually expanding expertise in our principal customer segments. In turn, we pass this knowledge on to our customers to help them successfully operate their projects.

“In the product area, we set the right course early on with our collaboration cloud strategy, supplementing our strong core product with additional services. With integration of Adobe PDF for digital approval procedures and the app for mobile capture of data on construction sites, we offer an attractive and comprehensive solution for our customers, which we are actively enhancing. Our proven strategy is to continuously make technology innovations accessible to our customers to deliver tangible benefits.”

When I met (and visited) think project! last year, Thomas was talking of revenues around €15m, so the latest year-end result is consistent with this.

Conject endured a flat period while it assimilated the former BIW Technologies business – acquired in December 2010 – into the group and coped with the global recession. The first full year of operations under Conject ownership (2011) were “challenging” for the UK business, though things did apparently start to improve in 2012 (post). Meanwhile, Conject group CEO Colin Smith told me poor sales in the German FM business had also kept the group’s overall performance “flat” (post) – as BIW rebranded, Colin had been talking of group revenues in excess of €18m (post). Has it faltered to the extent that think project! has been able to overtake? (I am investigating….)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2013/05/think-project-2012-revenues-reach-e15-5m/

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