BIW founder and SaaS business leader Colin Smith joins the board of Austria’s PlanRadar.

AEC software-as-a-Service pioneer Colin Smith has been appointed to the board of the Vienna, Austria-based SaaS vendor PlanRadar. The web-based application provides construction documentation, defect and task management capabilities and is now expanding internationally, opening a UK office in London.

The PlanRadar platform works on smartphone and tablet (iOS, Android and Windows) and allows construction workers to automate the entire documentation process with interactive blueprints and floorplans, claiming to save an average of seven working hours per week in admin time and averting errors. The company says over 3,500 customers already use PlanRadar worldwide to manage construction projects and real estate processes. In the last 12 months, PlanRadar says it has increased sales by 300 per cent and expanded its workforce to 57 employees.

Ibrahim Imam, MD and co-founder of PlanRadar says:

“Risks around bottlenecks in the supply of construction materials and tradespeople can be mitigated with platforms like PlanRadar; digitised processes can raise their efficiency potential against the competition, improve quality control and deliver 900 per cent ROI. In light of our rapid growth in the past year and the positive international business outlook for 2019, we have moved our head office to a much larger facility in central Vienna to support the increased demand.”

As part of its European growth, PlanRadar is boosting its board with industry heavyweight Colin Smith, founder of the UK ConTech pioneer BIW Technologies, later CEO of the merged BIW/Conject business and then CEO of the European arm of construction payment management provider Textura before it was acquired by Oracle in 2016. Smith is also chair of Newcastle-based NBS (which launched its first SaaS application, NBS Chorus, in August 2018). He says:

“There’s a lot of interest in ConTech right now, but it doesn’t just mean modular housing and 3D printing. It means simple but effective innovation across the entire supply-chain. PlanRadar has developed an intuitive platform that has revolutionised how Europe manages the documentation and communication process of the asset lifecycle. Now it’s time for the UK to benefit”

“It’s exciting to join the company during such a fierce expansion process with ambitious growth plans in place. I get asked to work with a lot of ConTech businesses, but PlanRadar has technology that can be rapidly adopted – it just works. I’m really looking forward to seeing the impact this platform is going to have on the UK’s construction sector and the difference it will make.”

On Smith’s appointment, Imam said:

“With over three decades of experience at the leading-edge of construction technology and a respected industry figure, we are delighted to welcome Colin to the Board. It’s a testament to the exciting vision we have for the business. I look forward to working with him to help PlanRadar in the next phase of its growth.”

(I worked with Smith at BIW from 2000 to 2009; pwcom.co.uk later provided consultancy services to Conject and Textura.)

Oracle has launched a new BIM coordination tool to expand its Aconex platform, now being assimilated into the Oracle portfolio

It is just over a year since Oracle‘s 2017 US$1.2bn acquisition of the Australian Software-as-a-Service collaboration vendor Aconex was approved by shareholders, and since then the US giant has been relatively quiet about its new business/product (now branded as an Oracle Construction and Engineering product offering, alongside Primavera and Textura, acquired in 2016 – post). Recently, however, it launched a new building information modelling (BIM) coordination capability: the Oracle Aconex Model Coordination Cloud Service.

Oracle says (news release) this will help resolve common BIM issues – a lack of collaboration, reliance on multiple applications, and missing integrations – by enabling construction design and project professionals to collaboratively manage BIM models across the entire project team in a true common data environment (CDE). As such, organisations can reduce the risk of errors and accelerate project success by ensuring each team member has access to accurate, up-to-date models.

“Issues with model management means projects go over budget, run over schedule, and end up with a higher total cost of ownership for the client. As part of the early access program for Oracle Aconex Model Coordination, it was great to experience how Oracle has solved these challenges,” said Davide Gatti, digital manager, Multiplex.

Single source of truth

With Oracle Aconex Model Coordination, organisations can eliminate the need for various point solutions in favor of project-wide BIM participation that drives productivity with faster processes and cycle times, enables a single source of truth for project information, and delivers a fully connected data set at handover for asset operation.

The Model Coordination solution enhances Oracle Aconex’s existing CDE capabilities, which are built around Open BIM standards (IFC 4 and BCF 2.1) and leverage a cloud-based, full model server to enable efficient, secure, and comprehensive model management at all stages of the project lifecycle.

The Oracle Aconex CDE, which is based on ISO 19650 and DIN SPEC 91391 definitions, provides industry-leading neutrality, security, and data interoperability. By enabling model management in this environment, Oracle Aconex unlocks new levels of visibility, coordination, and productivity across people and processes, including enabling comprehensive model-based issue and clash management.

Key features of the new solution include:

• Seamless clash and design issue management and resolution
• Dashboard overview and reporting
• Creation of viewpoints – e.g. personal “bookmarks” within models and the linking of documents to objects
• Integrated measurements
• Process support and a full audit trail with the supply chain

Frank Weiss, director of new products, BIM and innovation at Oracle Construction and Engineering, says:

“With Oracle Aconex Model Coordination, we’re making the whole model management process as seamless and easy as possible. By integrating authoring and validation applications to the cloud, users don’t need to upload and download their issues and clashes anymore.

“There’s so much noise and confusion around BIM and CDEs, much of it driven by misinformation in the market about what each term means. We believe everybody on a BIM project should work with the best available tool for their discipline. Therefore, open formats are critical for interoperability, and the use of a true CDE is key to efficient and effective model management.”

Oracle Aconex people and technologies update

Almost inevitably following the acquisition, there have been a number of personnel changes in the Aconex business. Founder and former Aconex CEO Leigh Jasper became Oracle VP, strategy and operations; fellow co-founder Rob Phillpot is global VP, product strategy (both recently invested in an Australian legal technology startup called Plexus; see also this SMH interview with Phillpot).

Chief marketing officer Gabriele Famous joined Trustpilot in April 2019, and Aconex’s ConnectedCost guru Guy Barlow moved (briefly) to Ineight. From the UK team, one-time VP, International Henry Jones left in January, along with Aconex’s longest-serving UK-based colleague Yuval Attias; both are now with a London-based online mental health business called Big White Wall.

UK-based sales director Steve Cooper, left, and colleague Duncan Kneller (who were both part of the BIW Technologies business back in 2000, before it was acquired by Conject in 2010, and before it was in turn acquired by Aconex in 2016),* are now part of the Aconex product team at Oracle – Cooper is VP of Europe while Kneller is sales director, UK & Ireland; another veteran BIW/Conject consultant, Nick Sansome, is EMEA practice director, professional services. The above-mentioned Frank Weiss is another veteran of the business, a co-founder of Conject.

Assimilation of Aconex into Oracle has not been without some hiccups.  Industry sources say there have been outages and periods of poor application performance, though I understand from company sources this is a reflection of ongoing work to update Aconex’s software architecture so that it is more compatible with Oracle’s standards (not dissimilar to what I heard this week about competitor Viewpoint’s technology stack needing to be updated). I also understand that plans are in place to transfer Aconex to Oracle hosting (meanwhile Viewpoint is shifting from Rackspace to AWS).

I have also heard industry gossip suggesting Oracle may have lost some deals due to poor flexibility on licensing Aconex. Project deals in this space in particular have generally been subscription-based, often paid by the month or quarter, allowing customers to curtail or extend usage if projects either finish early (rare) or overrun (more common). This, presumably, is challenging to an organisation like Oracle, culturally used to agreeing standard or fixed-term enterprise deals; construction and engineering is also just one of 23 industry segments served by Oracle, and while Primavera is a long-established part of its portfolio, it is an on-premise construction scheduling application, not a cloud-based solution.

(* I was head of communications at BIW Technologies from 2000 to 2009.)

CDEs? As BIM standards begin to emerge, do we also need some data exchange standards to support connected rather than common data environments?

Concerted efforts to mobilise the UK built environment industry to adopt building information modelling (BIM) began around 10 years ago, but there is still some distance to go. Anecdotal industry feedback, plus data from nine annual NBS BIM surveys (the 10th, the 2020 edition, has just been launched, by the way) and other reports, suggests UK BIM adoption spans a wide continuum.

Some clients, contractors and consultants now demand BIM from all their contract partners and suppliers. Other firms are in the process of BIM adoption. But there is still a large group of late adopters and laggards for whom BIM is still unfamiliar, even unknown, and they persist largely with conventional 2D and paper-type processes supported by email and spreadsheets. As an illustration (and indicator of BIM adoption), the 2018 NBS annual BIM survey looked at adoption of ‘common data environment’ (CDE) platforms by UK-based construction businesses: the data ranged from 21% of firms using a CDE for all projects, to 28% not using any CDE at all.

Shifts in construction away from paper-based working towards electronic collaboration have been under way since the late 1990s. Construction collaboration technology providers rose to prominence during the dot.com boom at the turn of the century, and as web-based Software-as-a-Service ‘extranet’ platforms become widely used across most major projects, it was perhaps inevitable that they would be seen as part of the foundation for BIM-based working.

It has been almost seven years since the CDE phrase and abbreviation first began to be used in connection with BIM – following the publication of UK guidance in PAS 1192 part 2 in February 2013 (read more in this October 2013 Extranet Evolution post: Thinking about BIM, SaaS and the Common Data Environment). The 2013 definition of a CDE was somewhat vague, envisaging several possible combinations of technologies, but some of the former ‘extranet’ vendors soon began to use the term for marketing, incorporating it into their product branding or product descriptions, and claiming their solutions would help project teams comply with the April 2016 UK government ‘Level 2’ BIM mandate.

International BIM standardisation

Since 2013, the BIM process and its supporting sets of documents, protocols and draft standards has gradually been developed and made more international. Based on the PAS 1192 suite, the first draft parts of ISO 19650  were issued for consultation in 2017, and the first two parts (ISO 19650-1: BIM concepts and priniciples, ISO 19650-2: BIM Delivery phase of assets) were published in late 2018.

(Two further parts are expected to be published in 2020: ISO 19650-3 Operational phase of assets, and ISO 19650-5: Security-minded approach to information management.)

In the meantime, the government-appointed UK BIM Task Group was eventually disbanded and UK BIM efforts are now being led by three main organisations: BSI, the Cambridge-based Centre for Digital Built Britain, and the UK BIM Alliance.* Closely involved with the international BIM standardisation movement, these bodies have helped develop UK-specific guidance to aid interpretation and adoption of the ISO 19650 standards – there is a UK national foreword to ISO 19650-1 and a UK national annex to ISO 19650-2, while guidance documents relating to both parts have also been produced and are now updated on a quarterly basis. These form part of the UK BIM Framework launched in October 2019.

This “overarching approach to implementing BIM in the UK” supersedes previous industry guidance and the notion of BIM Levels. The guidance documents – particularly the Part 2: Processes for Project Delivery – identify key activities and outputs for all parties involved in a project (client, consultants, contractors, specialists, etc), and describe what should be documented in appointments/contracts (in terms of information activities/deliverables) and what clauses within ISO 19650-2 are particularly relevant to each party. The 2nd edition, published in October 2019, also includes some 16 pages of detailed guidance about common data environments, written by Galliford Try’s John Ford.

Towards a common approach to CDE metadata

Importantly, Ford’s guidance highlights (p.24) that, despite some vendors’ branding and marketing assertions, “the CDE is a combination of technical solutions and process workflows (later stressing “it is fundamental that workflows are developed first and solutions are selected to facilitate the workflow”). Ford notes different technologies may be involved – indeed, the CDE may comprise a combination of technologies: “document management tools for design files, contract management tools that manage commercial information, email management tools for correspondences and mobile based tools for site quality data.” He continues: “Each solution may have multiple and different workflows ensuring that information is carefully planned, shared, stored, managed and retrieved and that it is timely, correct, complete, and consistent.”

Project delivery may also involve more than one ‘CDE’. As well as the ISO 19650-2 defined “project CDE”, delivery teams may implement their own additional CDEs “which can introduce complexities into the management of information” (I have talked to project managers where, for example, different vendors’ ‘CDEs’ are being used by the client, by a contractor, and by designers). Moreover, different CDE solutions “offer varying degrees of metadata assignment” (metadata is “data that describes and gives information about other data”), but “there isn’t currently … a standard exchange protocol adopted by our industry” (p.27), complicating how information and its metadata can be transferred from one system to another – a step which, Ford suggests, is often achieved by a “manual” workaround, though I am also aware of API-type solutions such as John Egan’s interesting BIMLauncher project.

(‘Extranet’ exchange protocols were once the subject of detailed conversations within the Network of Construction Collaboration Technology Vendors during the mid 2000s, when I was at BIW Technologies. Today in Europe, Germany in particular, a standard to promote open data exchange between CDEs – DIN SPEC 91931-1 – is being developed with input from vendors including thinkproject, Oracle – through people from its Germany’s Aconex [Conject] acquisition – and Nemetschek’s AllPlan.)

Against this background, the metadata subject was raised at a meeting (the first I chaired) of the UK BIM Alliance’s Technology Group on 26 November 2019. It was pointed out that “whole-life” audit trails defining the post-Grenfell “Golden Thread” of data about built assets, their components and systems might be compromised if that data and associated metadata could not be reliably exchanged between CDEs, particularly once information ceased to be managed by contractors and designers and became part of owners’ responsibilities. The envisaged future is also about connecting ‘Digital Twins’ throughout their operational whole life.

The Technology Group will be returning to the subject at a meeting on 5 February 2020, while the topic may also be covered in a UK BIM Alliance Technology Group panel discussion at BIMShowLive in Newcastle on Thursday 27 February 2020 (so I would clearly welcome any observations from Extranet Evolution readers).

Related Technology Group conversations also covered other UK CDE guidance, notably a guide Implementation of a Common Data Environment (PDF), produced for the Scottish Futures Trust by AECOM and published in August 2018 – so predating the ISO 19650 Parts 1 and 2, and the UK guidance. Another document, from the CDE sub group of the UK Government BIM Working Group and entitled Asset Information Management – Common Data Environment: Functional Requirements (PDF), also predates the ISO standards, etc, having been published in February 2018. (This may also need to be reviewed once ISO 19650-3 covering asset operations is published later in 2020, while its observations on storage and cyber security could well also be updated once ISO 19650-5 is published).

So, we are at an interesting point in the development of BIM and of CDEs. To date, much of the standardisation work has focused on processes and information deliverables – often files. While (naturally) vendors might prefer users to rely on a single CDE or vendor silo solution, perhaps we are now reaching the point where vendors need to be thinking less about single common data environments and more about connected data environments?

(* Disclosure: This blog post was written partly in my role, since July 2019, as a member of the UK BIM Alliance executive team and more recently as chair of its Technology Group, who’s members include several vendors of CDE technologies. The views are mine alone.)

It’s taken nearly two years, but Aconex finally announced the launch of Connected Cost earlier this month, potentially heralding a move into construction payment management.

With its July 2015 acquisition of US-based Worksite, a project cost management solution developed at ARES Project Management LLC, the Melbourne, Australia-based construction collaboration vendor Aconex started working towards integration of project cost management into its core SaaS platform, filling a gap in its product portfolio compared to several competitors, particularly in its strategically important north American market. In a February 2016 financial update (post), Aconex CEO Leigh Jasper said: “We’re already starting to see benefits from the Worksite acquisition. We’ve won a number of deals because of it and some customers are looking for that cost functionality.” The rationale for the March 2016 acquisition of Anglo-German rival Conject also partly underlined this shift (the former BIW Technologies business had added project cost control functionality to its UK platform more than ten years earlier), and Aconex was then talking about the commercial launch of its connected cost module later in calendar year 2016.

This apparently happened in November 2016, but was presumably a ‘soft launch’. Just over a year after the Conject deal, Aconex finally announced its Connected Cost solution earlier this month (read 5 April news release), providing cloud-based cost control across the project lifecycle. According to Aconex, it addresses the problem of disconnected teams and data:

• Siloed information – teams must chase information across organisations and applications, which slows the discovery of issues that can drive up costs and delay schedules.
• Manual updates – typically made via spreadsheets, these introduce errors and duplication that can jeopardize both data integrity and version control.
• Poor visibility – lack of accurate, real-time information makes it impossible to measure performance against budget in a meaningful and proactive way for a single project, much less a portfolio of projects or an enterprise.

Guy Barlow, global commercial director, Connected Cost, at Aconex claims: “only about 5% of projects meet best-in-class predictability in terms of cost and schedule. Approximately 80% run over budget, and the average cost overrun is 70%.”

Aconex’s SaaS Connected Cost solution is said to address industry challenges with collaborative project controls that provide a complete view of cost information across both individual projects and project portfolios. Each organisation using the solution can budget, forecast, track progress and performance, manage entire programmes, manage contracts, and process claims and payments. For example, with earned value management (EVM) capabilities, owners can forecast and report earned value using Cost Performance Index (CPI), Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and other tools.

Aconex to move into CPM

According to an interview in the Australian Financial Review, Aconex is planning to expand into financial services by using operational data about subcontractors and their projects to help lenders price credit to them. Director and co-founder Rob Phillpot, right, says the business is also looking to develop a payments function on the back of Connected Cost product. This would see them competing with, among others, Textura (the leading player in the construction payment management (CPM) market in north America which also expanded into Europe from 2014, and was acquired by Oracle in April 2016 – post), Australian vendor ProgressClaim (post) and UK-based OpenECX (post).

Aconex CEO Leigh Jasper was in the UK recently, and talked to Extranet Evolution. This first instalment of a two three-part interview discusses outcomes of the Conject acquisition and the development of the Connected Cost application.

The day after an Aconex investor presentation in Melbourne was a good time to get an update on the Australian construction collaboration Software-as-a-Service provider’s recent progress from CEO Leigh Jasper. Unusually, he hadn’t delivered part of the presentation himself.

That 4 May briefing was left to new CFO Paul Koppelman and COO Paul Perrott, who reiterated the Au$160-165m (c. £98-101m, US$122-126m or €113-117m) revenue forecast and the Au$15-18 EBITDA forecast given in January, along with expectations of underlying growth of 15-19%, and 20% revenue growth in the medium-long term. They also gave reassuring messages about sales momentum, reduced Brexit-related uncertainty in the UK, improved conditions in the US, and more stable oil prices. Aconex’s share price has rebounded to around Au$4.50 (it’s now recouped about half of that end-of-January plunge).

Meanwhile, Leigh Jasper was visiting the UK. I met him in the former Conject offices in Woking (now with Aconex branding – the UK operation also has an office in central London, and the locations would eventually be rationalised he told me, though this won’t affect the development centre in Nottingham).

Conject integration

The office location (which, pre-Conject, had been BIW Technologies’ head office – and my place of work when I worked for the business) naturally prompted some questions about how integration of the Anglo-German business had progressed since Aconex bought it for A$96m (c. £51m) in March 2016.

Some one-off expenses associated with the Conject deal were noted in the investor presentation, but the merger had involved few redundancies, Jasper said: “maybe a dozen or less” out of 220 (I know few of the Woking-based admin and marketing staff remain, while at least one Middle East employee was let go). The rationale for the acquisition had not been about eliminating a competitor and then stripping out costs, but about growth synergies, improving Aconex’s European footprint, retaining a really strong team (“our sales leaders in the UK are all the Conject guys”), and integrating some of Conject’s sector-leading technologies into the Aconex platform.

Jasper felt the integration of Conject into Aconex had progressed smoothly because many of its people had already gone through a similar process and learned lessons from the previous merger (when Munich-based Conject acquired BIW in December 2010).

Conject customer reaction to the acquisition had been very positive, Jasper said. Customers are not being forced to switch to the Aconex platform; current projects managed on Conject (“which is very cost-effective to host and run”) will continue to be supported until they finish (even if this took 5-6 years). Some Conject customers (Mace was mentioned) have already started new projects on the Aconex platform, he said, and “maybe only one” customer had been lost.

Jasper said the deal had made Aconex a stronger proposition to customers that previously would not have considered either Conject or Aconex:

“In the UK market, we are selling in to new customers where Aconex wouldn’t have won them, but the strength of the product combined with the strength of the sales team means we now have a very strong combination. There was probably a bit of under-investment in the UK-based Conject products and having a stronger Aconex platform has helped.”

UK and European customers can now be confident they are dealing with a company with a strong regional presence, while the deal had also extended the technology capabilities, he said.

Connected Cost

Foremost among these was Conject’s Financial Control module, a mature construction project cost management application that, in its early days, had helped differentiate BIW from its UK rivals. Coupled with Aconex’s July 2015 acquisition of US-based vendor Worksite from ARES Project Management Ltd (which “brought us forward several years in being able to get Connected Cost to market”), Aconex now had a strong cost management team (Jasper singled out one-time Conject professional services director Nick Sansome; post) and a powerful cost tool. Aconex Connected Cost was Beta tested with some customers then made generally available in late 2016 ahead of an April 2017 marketing push. It enables Aconex to compete with US-based vendors whose systems have historically been stronger on cost control than on document collaboration. It was proving a strong differentiator, Jasper said.

“We are seeing really big interest, and a number of deals have already been done on the product. [American carmaker and energy storage company] Tesla is now a customer of ours and is one we wouldn’t have got without Connected Cost, so it’s helping us win more work, and it’s really important to our customers. Particularly in the US, cost is more important to them than collaboration, and I think our cost product is the best SaaS solution on the market, particularly when you compare it to some of the products built 10 or 15 years ago.”

(The second and third parts of this interview includes discussion of BIM, asset management and mobile technologies, and of growth prospects if construction embraces digital transformation.)

In the second part of this now three-part Extranet Evolution interview with Aconex CEO Leigh Jasper (read part one), we talk about building information modelling, FM, mobile and other product development ideas.

Collaborative BIM

Conject’s merger with BIW was a prolonged process, with key developments in areas such as mobile technology and BIM delayed at a time when, particularly in the UK, rival vendors were investing heavily in research and development activities. As a result, Conject lagged behind SaaS collaboration competitors such as Viewpoint (formerly 4Projects), Aconex and Asite in adding mobile applications to its portfolio (buying France’s Wapp6 in January 2014), while the same rivals were also pushing ahead with support for BIM (Conject finally entered the BIM race in March 2015, some three years after 4Projects had already started two BIM R&D projects, and a full eight years after Asite BIM was launched).

Aconex Connected BIM was launched in October 2014, and is marketed as part of the core platform, not a module for which customers have to pay extra. Jasper explained this was part of a wider digital operating system strategy:

“As it’s part of the platform, in a sense everybody uses it, but obviously to varying degrees. Some companies will use it very heavily and put lots of models into the system. Others might use it at a more shallow level. But BIM is a critical part of what we do – it wasn’t going to be something that was optional. We are putting digital building blocks together enabling us to create a collaborative operating system for the construction industry, and BIM is part of that operating system, as is mobility, how we handle documentation, workflows, cost – all these interlink…. Everything needs to be able to link to everything else.”

Jasper said he has seen growing use of Aconex for BIM, bolstered by an approach embracing open BIM standards, such as COBie, IFC and BCF (Aconex’s website features a video about BIM Collaboration Format showing how its platform can be used to share model ‘viewpoints’ generated in Solibri Model Viewer, and to manage the underlying workflows). Involved with BuildingSmart, Aconex’s open philosophy also extends to open APIs:

“The more open companies are on the market the better it will be for adoption of technology. Everything we build we put an API around it, and then our customers can look at what degree they want to integrate with internal systems or even other providers in the market.”

Aconex’s Australian domestic market is not as far advanced as the UK in BIM adoption, Jasper said, partly because the UK had benefitted from the collective incentive of a government mandate:

“Certainly there is a level of BIM adoption in Australia which compared to the US is much higher, but behind the UK and one or two European countries. In the US, BIM became really topical about three or four years ago and we need to get that back. One of the challenges in the US is that people only look at it from their point of view. BIM is one of those things that, the more that owners and contractors work together the better the results for the project team.”

BIM for FM?

We touched on asset information management (“That’s probably the next step for the industry,” Jasper said, “Owners need to be specifying early what they need and then moving towards full asset life cycle and the operations phase”). However, Aconex’s investor pitch currently stops at information handover; Jasper hadn’t detected any huge demand from customers for Aconex to develop an FM solution:

“We see FM as part of that entire story but the reality is that … in our development stack there is still a lot to do in the design and construction phase. In five years, we will have a SaaS FM product as part of the suite, but we are not actively building that at the moment. Conject had such a product, but whether that’s the tool we end up taking forward we are reviewing at the moment. It’s a bit separate to other parts of the business.”

Mobile

By contrast, the functionality of Conject’s mobile tools would be retained: “We are pulling it all into one platform. Any functionality that we don’t have in Aconex Field we are pulling into our solution,” Jasper said. The company’s product development approach is not based on trying to cover every possible requirement: “We are not one for being a mile wide but an inch deep. If we are going to add a function or a module, we want to make sure it’s really good.”

Jasper summarised Aconex’s four functional priority areas as:

• deepening the collaboration tools (developments include currently extending configuration to manage packages of work)
• expanding field and mobility
• extending BIM capabilities, and
• Connected Cost (he talked about “making cost more collaborative”)

Aconex also wants to stay ahead of the game on security (in March 2017, Aconex announced it was seeking certification under the US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, FedRAMP – something that will enable Aconex customers to win US federal government projects with advanced security compliance requirements; in the UK, it is already registered on the government’s digital marketplace, GCloud, and we briefly discussed PAS1192-5 – post). Jasper also talked about incorporating scheduling information (currently dominated by Oracle’s Primavera and MS Project) and geolocation services into the platform.

However, this isn’t all about adding functionality to attract new customers. Jasper said the business also needed to keep reminding long-standing customers and existing end-users that the once-familiar Aconex product set was constantly evolving and expanding.

(Coming soon: in the final part of this interview, Leigh Jasper talks about the growth opportunities if construction embraces digital transformation.)

In the final section of this three-part Extranet Evolution interview with Aconex CEO Leigh Jasper (read part one; part two), the focus is digital transformation and long-term growth prospects.

Digitising construction

As a former McKinsey consultant, Jasper was pleased to talk about the McKinsey Global Institute’s ‘Digital Transformation’ reports showing how developed economies (like Australia, US, UK and western Europe) were pushing forward in digitising their construction industries. While the sectors were starting from a low base (in the US, MGI’s December 2015 report showed only agriculture and hunting was less digitised; a June 2016 MGI report showed that, in Europe, construction was bottom of the league), he said this meant there was lots of opportunities for technology providers such as Aconex to help the industry adopt new ways of collaborating.

“Construction is at the bottom in terms of spend on IT, which I see as an opportunity because at some point construction will start spending at the levels of other industries. The nature of the industry is that it’s quite conservative in terms of its adoption of technology, and the UK and Australia, with Germany in some respects, are well ahead of other markets. The [February 2017] McKinsey report shows all the countries that have been early adopters of our technology – collaboration or more general digitisation – have increased labour productivity in construction.”

Returning to the investor presentation and its growth forecasts, Jasper said:

“There is no reason why we can’t grow at 20%-plus for a very long time given the scale of the market. And I reckon we are still only less than 1% of the impact we could have on the global construction market. With all the providers globally, the market is still less than 10% penetrated, and I reckon we are picking up less than 10% of the total processes we could manage over time. As the industry digitises more and more, every process will become digital over time – well, it will have digital as well as physical components. So there is still more impact we could have on the industry, and that’s what gives us confidence we can grow for a very long time.”

We discussed emerging industry standards in areas such as BIM and workflow, and how these have helped providers develop software. “We believe we can be a big part of that standardisation across the industry, and particularly being open with our APIs, we can become part of wider digitisation.”

However (and consistent with what he said when announcing the 2016 results), Aconex’s growth was unlikely to be delivered by another Conject-style competitor acquisition, Jasper said, forecasting “massive” opportunities for many construction software businesses as the industry digitises:

“We’ll do it organically. There might be some product bolt-ons – we’ll make some ‘build versus buy’ decisions and we have a range of discussions going on regarding potential bolt-ons. Nothing immediate, though.

“We don’t see any others in our space as competition – we are all helping in this drive towards digitisation. If we can take IT spend from 1% to 2-3% in a $10 trillion construction market, the potential is massive.”

My analysis

While not the first SaaS construction collaboration provider to launch, Aconex has expanded out from its Australian roots to become the dominant pure-play provider in the global market (Autodesk and Bentley probably have similar global reach, but SaaS collaboration – Buzzsaw/BIM360 and ProjectWise respectively – are only parts of much bigger software portfolios, much of them based on on-premise installation and usage).

Recognising that SaaS provision quickly transcends national boundaries, and that the Australasian market alone would not satisfy their ambitions, Aconex established footholds in both developed and developing markets around the world. It also looked beyond building projects to embrace civil engineering and natural resource projects. While it suffered occasional setbacks due to regional conflicts (civil war in north Africa, for example) or economic downturns (eg: the global financial crisis, gas and oil price plunges), it seems this wide spread of activity has helped make Aconex more resilient compared to firms reliant on one region or one vertical market.

When Jasper talked about the Aconex technology stack “not being a mile wide but an inch deep”, I felt this might also now apply to their global reach. Its international expansion, particularly in the early days, was often based on creating small outposts, with energetic sales people looking for local early adopters to help grow a local footprint and reputation (not for the first time, someone at a competing SaaS firm last week described Aconex then as “backpackers”!). Aconex, particularly after the Conject acquisition, now has both wide international reach and sufficient depth of financial and human resources to build strong local operations in both developed markets and – probably more important for long-term growth – developing markets.

Aconex can also capitalise upon the technological sophistication of its customer base in the most developed markets such as the UK, Germany and other parts of western Europe, Singapore, Korea and Australasia and the US. As these push forward with BIM and other digital transformations (including – in due course – FM or asset management in the cloud), Aconex can make use of its customer and end-user networks to develop applications and functionality that can then support its customers’ construction and operations in emerging markets. Its ‘open’ philosophy may also help it grow as software partners market the integration opportunities with the Aconex platform.

The company has, understandably, attracted a lot of investor attention, being the first construction SaaS business to do an IPO. There was some uncertainty ahead of the on, off, on again flotation, but Aconex’s initial rise to ‘unicorn’ status in mid 2016 certainly boosted investor confidence in the sector. Partly as a result, several other ‘ConTech’ companies (eg: Finalcad, Plangrid, Procore, think project!) are now well-funded and expanding their marketing and software R&D activities, adding scale and momentum to the industry’s digital transformation.

If early adopter customers start to show a conservative and often sceptical industry that they can improve productivity and deliver projects at higher margins and with greater certainty, then this may encourage other construction companies to upgrade their systems and undertake the necessary people and process transformations to make digital construction ‘business as usual’. Looking long term, Jasper may well see net construction IT spend more than double. The potential is, indeed, massive there.

And, while FM may be off the Aconex product road map for now, if digital transformation eventually extends to owners/operators managing asset information for operational purposes, then the growth potential (and, as operational spend is more consistent over time than construction spend, the resilience of revenues) could be even greater.

Construct.pm is finding customers valuing it for compliance management and for accelerating project management reporting processes.

By coincidence, the day after WeWork acquired FieldLens, I visited a WeWork location in London’s Devonshire Square to talk to a tenant, Construct.pm (which also competes in the UK equivalent of FieldLens’s mainly north American target market).

I first talked to this mobile-first business in December 2015, learning how the Construct.pm form-builder and workflow platform could expedite the creation of processes and then allow users to track their progress. It was then also working with SaaS collaboration vendor Conject (now part of Aconex) to integrate simple sharing of drawings from Conject to users of the Construct.pm platform (see also October 2016 ISG case study).

CEO Ant Erwin and head of sales Mark Coates updated me on Construct.pm’s core strengths, which they saw as mobile data capture and reporting.

Compliance

The site-to-office mobile platform (currently iOS only, but the business is working on an Android version) is being developed to help project manager users accurately capture data while out on-site (“avoiding rubbish in, rubbish out”) and then re-use that data to manage workflows and to provide reports. One area they have particularly focused on is ensuring that any data collected is of high quality – for example, data is checked for completeness, and conditional fields and approval processes help ensure information is accurately captured in the right fields and formats.

Conventional capture of field data using paper-based systems and/or manual entry into Excel spreadsheets is still commonplace across many construction sites, but increased digitisation, including the adoption of BIM, is making professionals more conscious about the need to capture, record and reuse data consistently, both within projects and across a businesses’ projects.

Construct.pm is finding its platform used increasingly for various previously paper-dominated process including permit-to-work workflows (for example, for ‘hot works’ such as welding or brazing) or for delivery tickets – speeding up the automated flow of information from site to head office so that project valuations can be updated in minutes and payments expedited.

“Compliance is an increasingly strong point for us,” said Erwin. “Health and safety, environmental and quality issues have not always been dealt with properly by other apps out on the market, and we forget that some businesses are still getting their heads around Excel in the cloud.” (Other businesses in this sector that I have looked at in the past include HandS HQ and DarleyPCM).

“Many of our clients understand it’s not just about the forms,” Erwin continued. “Their efficiencies come from being able to manage the resulting workflows, being accountable, and avoiding hold-ups.” Construction and design programme improvements, avoidance of mistakes, higher individual productivity, faster approvals, and reduced admin costs are among the benefits reported by customers. Mark Coates also talked of one project which had been won because the contractor had demonstrated use of Construct.pm to the client, showing a commitment to visibility and to adoption of innovative technology that the client had been keen to see: “It’s good for reputation,” he said.

Reporting

Construct.pm is also finding its customers are valuing its platform’s reporting tools, said Erwin.

“More and more, we are surfacing the data. We’ve got the data collection; now it’s about using what we call ‘trackers’ to monitor actions and resulting issues, particularly if there are cost issues. Effectively, we can start to do part of the project managers’ jobs by producing coordinated reports for them. And we are using the latest live data, straight from site, to build these reports. … This means project managers can start to work entirely differently – being able to react based on live data as opposed to the old way, based on information that might be two weeks old.”

He also described how Construct.pm also interfaced with Microsoft Project through an open API to help project managers assess the impacts of issues on project programmes.

Coates said Construct.pm now had 100s of customers, most of them paying a monthly subscription to use the toolset across multiple projects. In some cases, up to 70 subcontractors may be using the platform at the request of the main Tier 1 contractor, but the business was also finding some subcontractors proactively opting to set up their own Construct.pm systems so that they too could report across multiple projects.

Aconex continues to grow revenues, effectively doubling in two years. Two-thirds of its business now comes from outside Australasia.

Melbourne, Australia-based Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration software vendor Aconex has announced its financial results for the year to 30 June 2017, reporting 31% revenue growth for the second year running (results were affected by exchange rates: at a constant currency, growth was 36%). Helped by a better second half-year performance, total revenues were Au$161.2 million (c. £99.3m, US$127.6m, or €108.3m), compared to the previous year‘s Au$123.4m.

EBITDA from core operations was up 10% to Au$15.0 million (c. £9.2m, US$11.9m, or €10.1m). After tax, however, the company recorded a Au$10m statutory loss, mainly due to integration expenses relating to the Conject deal and “amortisation of acquired intangibles”; from core operations, the business posted a net profit of Au$5m.

In the company’s investor presentation, Aconex highlighted that revenues had effectively doubled in two years. It says its platform has managed projects valued at over one trillion dollars in project value across 70 countries, and has 5.3 million project users managing 2.4 billion documents.

CEO Leigh Jasper said that the solid FY17 result reflected a stronger second half performance, a full year contribution from Conject and further penetration of the Company’s international markets which together have significantly strengthened its leading global position.

“Revenue increased in the second half of the year as market conditions improved and we continued to transition project customers to enterprise agreements, especially in ANZ. With Conject fully integrated into the business we also saw stronger revenue growth in Europe. We are truly a global business with two-thirds of our revenues now generated outside Australia and New Zealand.

“To drive greater returns and take advantage of the rapid growth in technology adoption across the industry, we have ramped up our investment in sales & marketing and our operational infrastructure. We have also significantly increased investment in our product, with 22% of revenue committed to research and development. We enhanced our offering and developed several new modules, including Connected Cost [launched in April 2017], and extended our ecosystem. Connected Cost alone has considerably increased our total addressable market and improved our overall win rates in all our regions.

“Meanwhile, our certification for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is in process, which will enable us to service government projects with the highest compliance requirements in the world. This is a major competitive advantage.

“In the coming year, we will continue to extend our leadership position through further investment in our international markets and ongoing product development. We expect to grow revenue by 15 to 19% while increasing EBITDA and generating positive cash.”

The company says the revenue uplift was driven by the 2016 Conject acquisition, strong growth in its international markets and an improved second half performance in ANZ (despite competitive pressures in its home market). The company’s EBITDA margin reduced slightly from 11.0% in 2016 to 9.3% in 2017, due to the acquisition of the Conject business (Aconex says it incurred Au$7.9m in related acquisition, restructure and integration costs) and ongoing investment in product, sales, marketing and client service.

Sales and marketing expenses grew 28% to Au$59.2m as Aconex bolstered its international sales teams to drive further market penetration. The company also increased investment in engineering and product development – partly due to addition of the Worksite and Conject engineering teams.

Regional performance

International revenues were up 45% year-on-year, while revenues in the ANZ region increased 9% from Au$48.8m in FY16 to Au$53.3m in FY17 due to new business growth and the ongoing conversion of customers to enterprise agreements (with 36 new deals signed), which now represent more than 65% of the region’s revenue. Elsewhere:

• Revenues in Europe and Africa increased 143% from Au$17.5m to $42.6m, principally driven by the full-year contribution of Conject (though revenue was impacted by adverse foreign currency movements, particularly the depreciation of the pound and Euro against the Australian Dollar). The business is now securing larger contracts in mainland Europe, and the UK pipeline was said to be “growing in a challenging market” (in January 2017, the company talked of Brexit uncertainty and revised its October 2016 forecasts causing its shares to slump).
• Middle East revenues increased 11% from Au$22.4m to Au$24.9m.
• Americas revenues increased 16% from Au$21.3m to Au$24.6m.
• Asia revenues increased 19% from Au$13.3m to Au$15.8m.

The Americas and Asia businesses are operating at negative margins as they invest in sales and marketing for future growth, looking to eventually replicate Aconex’s strong performance in the Australasian market.

In the medium term, Aconex says it expects revenue growth of more than 20% with increasing EBITDA.

Market reaction

After the January 2017 slump – to a low of Au$2.92 – Aconex’s shares gradually recovered to hover around Au$4 for most of the past six months. Prior to the results announcement, they were trading on the Australian Securities Exchange at around Au$4.60, but the share closed at Au$4.14, down 10% (and less than half the Au$8.38 high reached just over a year ago), as investors digested the results and reflected on the statutory loss and on Aconex’s sub-20% forecast for FY18 growth (read the AFR‘s Yolanda Redrup and what The Australian said).

CEMAR is focused purely on contract management and its expertise in NEC contracts has helped it achieve leadership in this specialist cloud-based software market.

Gloucester, UK-based construction contract management software vendor CEMAR is single-minded in its focus on construction contracts and on the NEC suite in particular. This focus has seen the company enjoy year-on-year double-digit revenue growth – it generated around £3m in the 2016/17 year to 30 April 2017, and director and COO Nick Woodrow told me it expected revenues to grow 50% to around £4.5m in the current year.

Woodrow joined CEMAR as director and COO in October 2015, when the business had 15 staff. Its success since then has seen its headcount grow to 46 staff, and Woodrow expected it would be over 50 before the end of the financial year. Much of this personnel growth has been in software development, with Agile methodologies strongly favoured, judging from the many whiteboards on the upper floor of CEMAR’s modern office in Barnwood, to which the company moved two years ago.

The NEC battleground

CEMAR was founded by NEC contract expert and civil engineer Ben Walker (now CEO, right) and his father Andy (now retired); Ben’s brother, Dan, is CEMAR’s CIO (Ben and Dan Walker and Nick Woodrow are the business’s shareholders). The business was incorporated in 2005 and initially developed traditional on-premise software (formerly CMToolkit, its CEMAR name is derived from Contract Event Management And Reporting) to track contract events (“it’s about event management, not document management”, Woodrow said – read Ben Walker’s post “Think event, not document”). However, by the end of the decade, the company had switched to a Software-as-a-Service model, competing against collaboration vendors 4Projects and Conject (both awarded NEC3 content provider status in December 2010), plus Asite (not similarly favoured by the NEC but nonetheless providing NEC3 contract support to clients such as Transport for London) and other UK-based NEC3 specialists including Sypro (December 2010 post)* and MPS, plus South Africa’s Contract Communicator.

By this stage, contract change/workflow management had become a fiercely contested battleground among the ‘extranet’ vendors. Sypro sought to differentiate itself by promoting its NEC process reporting tools, and in early 2012 established a partnership with Unit 4/Business Collaborator (the subject of an MBO in late 2014), after MPS had pursued a similar relationship with Denmark’s Docia (acquired by RIB, also in 2014).

While the NEC battleground has quietened in recent years (largely overtaken by the BIM push, of course), CEMAR’s growth suggests contract tools remains a lucrative market. Woodrow told me the business had made significant inroads in market sectors including water and other infrastructure, and in higher education (maps in the company’s business development office were peppered with multiple client locations).

And as international interest in the NEC suite accelerates, partly due to the new and expanding NEC4 suite (which includes a Design Build and Operate variant and is set to include an Alliancing version), Woodrow is optimistic about CEMAR’s future prospects. He highlighted UK prospects in the so-called 6 H’s (HS2, Hinkley, Heathrow, Highways, Housing and Heritage), and about new/revised NEC4 workflows (eg: contractor proposals, proposed instructions, task ordering). CEO Ben Walker is one of NEC’s drafting team, a consultant, tutor and ICE examiner, and CEMAR is acknowledged by name in all NEC4 contracts – something of a marketing coup, in my view (note: the CEMAR solution can also support FIDIC and other contract forms).

Woodrow talked about opportunities in southeast Asia and in New Zealand (coincidentally markets successfully targeted by Conject before its acquisition by Australia’s Aconex in March 2016), and an integration with GroupBC’s Business Collaborator platform, displacing Sypro and set to be presented to BC users at its user conference (28 September 2017). CEMAR’s preferred approach is integration rather than trying to add functionality to cover every need (read Dan Walker’s blog post “One size does not fit all”). We also talked about integrations with ERP solutions, taking advantage of CEMAR’s detailed handling of NEC-related payment application and certification processes – encroaching into the territory of Oracle’s Textura application, among others.

(And while we are on the subject of Oracle, tighter integration with Primavera P6 has to be a consideration – scheduling tools have for too long sat outside the collaboration environment – something that I discussed with Aconex’s Leigh Jasper in May 2017.)

CEMAR in action

Woodrow guided me through the main CEMAR capabilities, concentrating on its core contract management capabilities and on its reporting tools, CEMAR Analytics. Once logged in, authorised users are presented with a dashboard view of their current projects and can then drill down to particular contracts, with their access to information and functions tightly controlled by a highly granular user profile administration system (security provision options include two-factor authentication).

The company prides itself on what Woodrow described as its “obsession” with using the correct contractual terminology (even down to the use of italics or capitalisation of certain words). While CEMAR users might initially be looking to emulate the creation of notifications that resembe familar paper-based correspondence (which it does by way of .pdf letter versions of all communication), Woodrow says they quickly gravitate towards viewing processes as events rather than as series of documents (we talked about demographic changes shifting from paper-oriented user tendencies towards a preference for real-time online information visibility). He also underlined commercial managers’ wish to separate sharing of associated documents or drawings as contractually significant versus including these items for more general “knowledge sharing” purposes (nonetheless, he demonstrated the GroupBC Business Collaborator integration to show how it would be possible to connect recipients to relevant background documentation).

CEMAR Analytics presents powerful summaries of recent and ongoing processes, and can be used to help set the agendas for meetings, Woodrow said. He showed how search tools could be used across processes to, for example, show the aggregated impact of weather events in a set period of time. As well as a wealth of reporting tools, CEMAR includes ‘group reports’ allowing frequently required selections of reports to be combined into longer reports. The existing, already comprehensive presentation of bar and pie-charts and line graphs could improve still further – CEMAR is looking at potential integration of business reporting tools such as Microsoft’s PowerBI (also mentioned by Bentley in November 2017).

The application is peppered with contextual help buttons, helping explain how users can do things and ensuring compliance with the relevant NEC contract – “many of our help desk queries are not about how to use the software but how to manage things under the NEC,” Woodrow told me – and the Zendesk-driven support system also provides numerous video tutorials.

My view

Contracts, and by implication contract change management software, can seem a somewhat dry area of expertise, but compliance with contracts is often critical to the successful delivery of construction projects. While the CEMAR solution may lack the pizzazz of drawing and model sharing environments, it is a modern and user-friendly application in which colour-coded contractual information is logically presented, and the attention to detail (both in terms of contractual terminology as well as software presentation) is one of its major strengths.

The former 4Projects and Conject NEC toolsets no longer enjoy NEC licensed content provider status, and, it seems to me, neither of these (now rebranded) businesses today promote their contract process support quite so overtly – instead they seem happier to talk about BIM, solution ‘ecosystems’ and integration. Maybe the GroupBC relationship might set a precedent (assuming there’s no exclusivity agreement), with CEMAR becoming the standard contract change module for other collaboration/’common data environment’ (CDE) platforms? Meanwhile, CEMAR’s double-digit revenue growth is also impressive – matching, even surpassing, the figures trumpeted by CDE vendors, and suggesting that contract management is just as lucrative a construction SaaS market.

* Disclosure: Sypro is a past client of pwcom.co.uk Ltd, as are Conject (now part of Aconex) and 4Projects (now Viewpoint). I have also provided consultancy services to GroupBC.

UK construction collaboration technology vendor Viewpoint grew revenues 30% in 2016 to £15.1m, reported a £2.5m profit, and is bullish about its 2017 prospects.

Viewpoint‘s EMEA operation has shared its latest financial results with me, showing the Newcastle, UK-based SaaS construction collaboration technology vendor has increased revenues 30% year on year, in the year to 31 December 2016.

Reported revenues for Viewpoint Construction Services Ltd were £15.097m (roughly US$20.47m or €18.49m), compared to 2015’s £11.587m. Growth, while still healthy, was down from the previous “bumper” year’s 48% – reflecting some uncertainty resulting from the UK’s Brexit situation (a factor that softened Aconex’s forecasts in March this year too) and the resulting weakened pound.

While the revenue growth rate may have slowed from the 48% reported in 2015, the result underlines how far Viewpoint’s combined SaaS collaboration and mobile business sits ahead of its principal UK-based competitors. Reading’s GroupBC grew its revenues 33% in 2016, while London’s Asite was up 14% to 30 June 2016.

Two of Viewpoint’s principal competitors in the international SaaS space both reported similarly strong revenue growth. In May Germany’s think project! reported 30% sales growth and said underlying revenues grew 17% in 2016, while Aconex enjoyed 31% growth in the year to 31 June 2017 (and its UK operation grew revenues by nearly 40% – see final section below).

Viewpoint EMEA returns to profit

After the losses reported in the past two years, Viewpoint EMEA has returned to profit, declaring a pre-tax profit of £2.495m (roughly US$3.38m or €3.06m), and returning it to the kind of profit trajectory it enjoyed before the February 2013 Viewpoint deal and the December 2014 acquisition of MCS/Priority1 (now Field View). The UK business says it makes up 12% of the global Viewpoint group.

Looking forward

During quarter 4 of 2016, Viewpoint says it saw a growth in sales of 16% compared to quarter 1. There has also been an increase in orders received during the early part of 2017 leading the directors to be confident that sales in 2017 will increase on 2016 levels. Total order intake in 2016 was £10.2m. The company also shared a 12 month view of forecast demand from key customers: at 31 December 2016, the company had orders outstanding of £10.1m.

The number of customers at the year end stood at 207, up 16% from 2015, while the user base continued to grow, increasing 67% from the previous year – a total of over 85,000 new users, or over 7000 new users per month – contributing to a global total of over 450,000 users worldwide, located in 170 different countries. Use of Viewpoint’s Field View has also been expanding: it added over 1400 new projects in 2016, and over 10,000 new users of the mobile platform; the user base created over 1.3 million tasks during the year.

Aconex and Conject financial updates for UK

The above UK vendor graphs incorporate updated figures for the UK operations of Aconex and Conject in the year to 30 June 2016 (Conject’s report was for the six months from its previous year-end of 31 December, as the businesses align their reporting periods). The reports mainly cover the period before the merger of the two parent groups, and before the EU referendum.

• Aconex’s UK operation enjoyed 39% revenue growth, from £3.004m to £4.190m. After 2015’s small £5k loss, the London-based business generated a profit of £474k in the year to June 2016.
• Woking, Surrey-based Conject’s UK operation generated £3.129m revenues in the six months, suggesting a slight slow-down from the previous full year’s revenues of £6.385m. The director’s report says the company recorded a pre-tax loss of £424k “but this included restructuring costs and provisions of £467k following the acquisition” (EBITDA otherwise would have been £59k). New order sales intake of £3.9m was achieved in the half year, with the UK team in particular said to have performed well. The order book (future recognisable revenues) at 30 June 2016, was £12.7m.

When the combined group reported its annual results to 30 June 2017 in August, it said a factor in its 31% revenue growth was its first full-year contribution from the former Conject operation.

BIMShowLive 2018 is coming up in a month’s time – in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, on 28 February and 1 March 2018 – but first there is the little matter of the BIM Awards, being held on 27 February.

To my surprise, I have been shortlisted in the ‘Smartest Blogger’ category, where:

… an individual … posts messaging on their company/personal websites directly related to BIM and digital construction. We’re looking for topical, current and possibly controversial content which has consistently made a genuine and meaningful contribution to the built environment.”

I am flattered to be shortlisted – alongside Rob Jackson of Bond Bryan and BRE’s Dan Rossiter, both of whom write far more knowledgeably about BIM than I do – but the nomination does at least give me an excuse to reflect on the past 12 years or so….

History

ExtranetEvolution started in September 2005 following publication of a book about construction collaboration technologies I wrote for publisher Taylor & Francis (today part of Routledge) while working at what was then BIW Technologies. The blog was originally intended to help me produce a second edition of the book, but it took on a life of its own. By the time I left BIW (later Conject and now part of Aconex) and started out as an independent consultant in February 2009, the blog had become something of a shop window for my expertise, as well as a news and features resource for anyone interested in construction, collaboration, cloud computing, Software-as-a-Service, and related areas such as mobile, social media and BIM. (As I have said many times, “it’s a small niche, but it’s my niche“.)

Initially, a little UK-centric, it has also expanded to include more content about developments in Europe, the US and Australasia, among other places. Since 2005, I have covered a succession of acquisitions and mergers, personnel changes, numerous product launches and industry conferences. I have interviewed senior figures representing most of the major AEC-oriented collaboration vendors, and a great many more startups. I have watched businesses grow – and seen a few die – and recorded their ups and downs along the way.

Statistically speaking

I have used two blogging platforms: first, Typepad and, since 2011, WordPress, publishing nearly 1800 blog posts. Since February 2009 (when my Google Analytics records start), the blog has had 1.24 million page views, and more than 270,000 users.

In 2011, ExtranetEvolution had its then best year, delivering 59,416 page impressions to 23,746 unique visitors. In 2014, I topped 100,000 page views, with content read by nearly 49,000 visitors; my 2015 visitor total was just short of 52,000 – still my best year.

My most visited post is from February 2013 (16 reasons why nobody yet dominates the construction SaaS collaboration sector – viewed over 15,000 times), while the daily peak was 2,641 when I wrote about Aconex’s acquisition of Conject in March 2016. M&A activity is clearly a recurring interest; my 2017 peak was in December, following Oracle’s offer to buy Aconex.

(I have been a little less productive in terms of blog posts in the past two years, mainly for family reasons – my stepmother died in early 2016, my father died in July 2017, and I had three other family bereavements – but also pressure of other work.)

Thanks to everyone who has supported ExtranetEvolution since 2005, and thanks to whoever nominated me for the BIM Awards!

Update (26 April 2018) – I didn’t win the award, which went to Dan Rossiter. I didn’t attend the event – I broke my right arm on 25 February, and the ‘Beast from the East’ [bad weather] also scuppered my travel plans.

Well-established in France, Resolving is extending its mobile-first application to support international markets and BIM-based processes. The solution captures field progress, conformity inspections, commissioning and other field activities.

There have been numerous changes of ownership among the leading vendors of Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration technologies in recent years. The spate of mergers and acquisitions has also been accompanied by frequent moves between companies. Some of these are forced – the acquirers may replace existing personnel with their own appointees. Other moves are voluntary – employees may grab the opportunity to take their skills and experiences to new employers, some of whom may be keen to recruit industry-leading expertise.

In the 30 months since Oracle first bid to buy Aconex (December 2017: Oracle set to buy Aconex) – a US$1.2bn deal finally agreed by Aconex shareholder in March 2018 – several staff from Aconex and its various buys (including the UK’s BIW Technologies*, Germany’s Conject, US-based Worksite and Australia’s Grazer) have moved on (read: Oracle launches Aconex Model Coordination). A handful are now with Paris, France-based construction project management software provider Resolving, helping it to target English-speaking markets.

Resolving – a digital accelerator

Resolving describes itself as a “digital accelerator” of real estate and construction sectors. It is a mobile-first platform designed to support design, construction, operation and deconstruction (decommissioning) phases (thus appealing to customers interested in circular economy thinking – French multinational Suez is one example – news release). Resolving combines construction process management, document management and open BIM (it is a member of BuildingSmart France) with powerful reporting dashboard features and APIs to connect with all existing vendors.

Around 40% of its French customers use Resolving as a single platform for field management and document management. Many of these (general contractors, asset owners, project management and engineering firms) also use Resolving to support BIM-driven projects as their ‘common data environment’ (CDE) and to digitise their internal processes (field quality control and data capture).

The company was founded in Lyon in 2003 and was initially focused on the French market. But in recent years, the now 50-strong business has started to market itself more internationally, opening offices in London and Hong Kong, with a Middle Eastern base starting soon. It is looking to disrupt competitors including France’s FinalCAD, Autodesk’s BIM 360 Field, Viewpoint’s Field View, Aconex Field and Snagr, and claims to have tripled its revenues in the past 18 months.

Mobile-first

One of the key figures in this recent shift is Franck Meudec, right, the founder of Wapp6, acquired by Conject in 2014, who joined Resolving in April 2018 as vice-president and CEO (news release). Meudec is a veteran of the SaaS construction collaboration scene, having worked with BuildOnline in the mid-2000s (September 2006: Changes at BuildOnline) and its rebranded successor CTSpace, acquired by a French buyer, Sword Group, in December 2007, and later bought by the UK-based Idox Group (November 2011: IDOX acquires CTSpace for £11.6m cash). Once at Conject, he led the company’s rapid development of its mobile defects and inspection management tool, launched in May 2014 (Conject fleshes out its mobile defects offering), and stayed with the business through its 2016 acquisition by Aconex, only leaving after Aconex was bought by Oracle.

Meudec has been joined at Resolving by other veterans from the BIW/Conject/Aconex/Oracle business: Nick Sansome, Richard Moyle, Chris Woodbridge and Hervé Hamelin. They are helping to internationalise the Resolving platform to suit English-speaking markets (the company has already won customers in the US, Middle East, Africa and Asia on hotels, residential and transportation projects), and to develop its functionality to support BIM process demands, welcoming the company’s investment in R&D (comprising 15 of the company’s 50 staff).

High-resolution interface

Resolving’s solution initially targeted existing asset owners and was first developed on the Apple iOS platform. An Android version quickly followed, and a full Windows mobile app is also in development. The interface offers high-resolution views of detailed floor plans (some projects have thousands – one project in Macau had 30,000; among its reference customers, Resolving is the client standard for Mandarin Oriental Hotels), allowing users to view DWGs and PDFs. When used for defects management, Resolving offers conventional ‘Pin to Plan’ features, with data capture streamlined through 100s of templates for standard types of defects (dents, scratches, stuck doors, etc). It also has powerful control forms with high levels of field-level security.

The Resolving processes also work in a BIM-enabled environment, supporting IFC and native Revit, with issues managed using BIM Collaboration Format (BCF). A COBie export tool is also in development. Models can be viewed in the mobile application, and used for data capture processes (checksheets, inspections, progress-checking) as well as access to associated documentation. 2D viewing is also offered, with workflows for reviewing, comment, mark-up and comparison.

(* I was head of communications at BIW Technologies from 2000 to 2009, working with several of the current Resolving team.)