Extranet Evolution

Google Wave and project collaboration

I wrote on 29 May 2009 about Google Wave, and have just got round to reading a great post by my friend and fellow Be2camp co-founder Jodie Miners where she talks about Google Wave and its potential for project collaboration in the construction sector. Read her post here.

Like me, she reckons that Wave is unlikely to replace construction project-specific document management systems for major projects, but reckons it could be used to manage small projects, and perhaps to improve management of meetings, form processing and photo management. She also talks about the Incite product Keystone (see my post), and its potential to place photos in context on floor plans. Jodie also usefully links to some other articles on the same topic before concluding with some thoughts regarding construction use of social media (I am a bit more positive about how AEC professionals are adopting Web 2.0, but we still have a long way to go! - see my pwcom2.0 post earlier this week) and the potential use of Google Wave in facilities management. I look forward to her 'new Wave' thoughts: a 'part 2' is promised for some future date.

Technorati Tags: Google Wave,Be2camp,Jodie Miners,project collaboration,construction,document management systems,Incite,Keystone,social media,AEC,Web 2.0,facilities management

Collaboration vendors unveil (old) plans for deeper interoperability

Last month, members of the UK-based Network for Construction Collaboration Technology Providers (NCCTP) announced plans to provide greater integration between their different applications (see news release). At the time, I was too busy to write about it, but the topic cropped up briefly in conversation with the Incite guys (post) recently, so I've had another look.

To be honest, the "new plans outlined by the NCCTP members" are nothing new. Ever since it was founded in 2003, the NCCTP has had a long-term vision of achieving real-time integration - so this latest "news" is simply a reiteration of that objective.

However, its members struggled to reach even the intermediate step of creating a useful export/import standard that would allow information and metadata to be switched from one member's system to another. I represented my former employer BIW Technologies at numerous NCCTP meetings at which progress towards the data exchange standard was debated ad nauseum (see Evening, Standard?), with BIW and Aconex finally giving up on the initiative last year. Far from being the claimed 'confidence builder', given the different architectures of the vendors' applications and their varying levels of process complexity, it was only possible to achieve a lowest common denominator standard, and, in many instances, whenever data needed to be transferred a considerable amount of work was still required.

Reaching the next level, which would allow users to use their favourite application as an interface to retrieve and interact with information stored in a different system (thus avoiding the need to retrain on different systems), remains - to me, at least - some way off.

Why? Well, for a start, the NCCTP now only represents a minority of the vendors active in the UK market. I understand BIW, Asite, Cadweb and Aconex have all recently ceased NCCTP membership; Sword CTSpace (formerly BuildOnline) was expelled from the NCCTP some years ago; other providers such as ePin, Union Square, Autodesk Buzzsaw, StoreData and MPS were never part of the initiative in the first place; and there are new players in the market (Woobius and Clouds UK are two recent examples - see posts here and here respectively) for whom data exchange is not yet (as) important.  

Second, it is debatable whether the remaining NCCTP members deliver "the market leading collaboration tools”. 4Projects is undoubtedly one of the most widely-used systems in the UK, but they have always historically lagged behind BIW in terms of turnover and number of users, and Business Collaborator, Causeway and Sarcophagus have all lagged behind 4Projects.

Third, as the various applications have developed, the initial focus on sharing drawing and document files has diminished in importance, with some vendors looking to focus on contract administration or financial control (BIW) or building information modelling (Asite) to differentiate their solutions. Expanding functionality to cover a wider range of workflows and an expanding range of metadata will create further interoperability gaps between them and the remaining NCCTP members.

Technorati Tags: UK,Network for Construction Collaboration Technology Providers,NCCTP,integration,Incite,export/import standard,BIW Technologies,data exchange standard,Asite,Cadweb,Aconex,Sword CTSpace,BuildOnline,ePin,Union Square,Autodesk Buzzsaw,StoreData,MPS,Woobius,Clouds UK,4Projects,Business Collaborator,Causeway,Sarcophagus,contract administration,financial control,BIM

Clouds UK: a new name and a competitive offering

Earlier this week, I had afternoon coffee in London with Andy Newsham and Alison Day, joint chief executives of York-based Clouds UK. This is the new name of what used to be a construction-oriented software-as-a-service business that I previously knew as e-constructionmanager.co.uk. The rebranding reflects the wider range of services now offered by the company, some of which now pose a challenge to providers offering construction collaboration solutions, while others are clearly aimed at owners/occupiers/operators of extensive property portfolios.

Andy and Alison gave me some historical background to the business. It developed out of a business, Eurosafe UK, focused on helping companies manage their compliance on asbestos management and health and safety issues, later expanding into other areas such as fire risk management. Clients' compliance documentation relating to their property portfolio was stored in an online information portal, and this portal's functionality was then expanded. Now any authorised member of a client's professional team could interrogate the database and establish, for example, the test status of all lifts or escalators operated by the company. A suite of reports also allows clients to quickly review legal compliance issues with at-a-glance dashboard views giving high-level status and the ability to drill-down to the detail of every asset.

One of the first big clients to use the service was pub chain Punch Taverns, and the company's client portfolio has since grown to include several High Street names (TK Maxx, phones4u, Woolworths, Comet, William Hill, Virgin Mobile) as well as property developers, NHS Trusts and hotel chains.

The range of services offered has also expanded beyond compliance. For Punch Taverns, for instance, Clouds UK has enabled the company to run their construction projects online. Punch's new £7 million corporate HQ in Burton-on-Trent was planned, tendered and built using the Clouds UK platform to manage flows of information.

Away from the construction sector, Clouds UK's solution portfolio now includes discrete products for the property lettings market and the insurance industry, as well as an 'Ultimate Manager' solution offering a single point solution to any organisation managing a diverse range of property assets. Pricing is competitive too. Basic services start from just £49 per month with no limit on the number of users and 3Gb storage (bronze package), Construction Manager starts at £69/month, while the Ultimate solution costs £249/month.

"So why haven't I heard of you?" I asked. It seems that the company's growth to date has largely been through word-of-mouth recommendation, but this may change. Rather than being solely reliant on its own sales efforts, Clouds UK is, I think, the first business in this field to be offering franchises in 120 areas of the UK. You could secure a franchise for £18,000 (or £23,000 for franchises covering parts of London, Manchester or Birmingham).

The new branding - complete with its cute guardian angel 'Hector the Protector' - gives an overall umbrella to the product range, and is also perhaps one of the most explicit statements that customers' data is being managed "in the cloud".

Technorati Tags: Andy Newsham,Alison Day,Clouds UK,software-as-a-service,SaaS,e-constructionmanager.co.uk,construction collaboration,Eurosafe UK,compliance,asbestos management,health and safety,fire risk management,portal,dashboard,Punch Taverns,TK Maxx,phones4u,Woolworths,Comet,William Hill,Virgin Mobile,tendering,Ultimate Manager,pricing,Construction Manager,franchises,Hector the Protector

INCITE insight

Just before I went on holiday (Menorca, very nice), I had lunch in London with Sean Kaye and Michael Baker, respectively CEO and General Manager, Technology of Australia-based construction collaboration vendor Incite.

I blogged about Incite a couple of times last year (here and here). Then it was a small business largely focused on the Australian market but was beginning to extend operations overseas (Hong Kong and Dubai), and was delivering ThinkProject! software on a Software-as-a-Service basis.

More recently (April 2009), however, Incite unveiled its own next generation project collaboration tool and platform, Incite Keystone. This was showcased at Microsoft's Australian ReMix Conference (11 June 2009) as an example of Software-plus-services, and delegates heard how the application had been from the ground up over the previous 12 months with Web 2.0 technologies like JSON, jQuery and some Microsoft things like Entity Framework, etc (see the Remix video here). Not yet part of the core product but really ground-breaking is an integration with Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping tools (have a look at the Incite blog).

The Incite website links to a tour featuring YouTube videos about the new product's functionality, which also extend to a mobile phone application (Keystone Mobile), an archive product (Incite Archive), and - perhaps most interesting of all - an Incite API, allowing customers and developers to build their own applications, integrate enterprise systems and access project data within Keystone. (Incite is not the only vendor to offer such a service; as part of its recent release - see post - UK-based vendor Asite also announced its own AppBuilder.)

Incite Keystone is offered on four plans:

1. Basic (AU$15 per month per user + AU$15/month per Gb storage - that's about £7.30 or just under US$12 at today's exchange rates)
2. Standard (AU$29 per month per user + AU$12/month per Gb storage)
3. Ultimate (AU$39 per month per user + AU$8/month per Gb storage)
4. Ultimate Enterprise

For the above, support service levels are progressively enhanced as you move up the scale.

I understand that Incite will continue its relationship with ThinkProject Solutions but will also be looking to migrate customers to its new Incite Keystone platform.

The business's headcount has also grown, to upwards of 35 people, with further growth likely during 2009. An office is set to be established in Hong Kong and Incite is also keeping the Middle East situation under review, but it also looks likely that the company could soon be targeting Europe.

Technorati Tags: Sean Kaye,Michael Baker,Australia,construction collaboration technology,Incite,Hong Kong,Dubai,ThinkProject! Software-as-a-Service,SaaS,Incite Keystone. Microsoft,ReMix,Web 2.0,JSON,jQuery,Entity Framework,Virtual Earth,mapping,YouTube,mobile phone,archive,Incite API,Asite,AppBuilder,Europe.

Koenig leaves Sword CTSpace

Howard Koenig has now officially left Sword CTSpace to return to the workforce management software sphere, joining Aruspex, specialists in strategic workforce planning, as CEO (CEN story; word of his departure did, however, creep out prematurely in February). He was head of North American operations for Sword.

In the early 2000s, Howard was CEO of Citadon, which merged with troubled UK-based construction collaboration technology vendor BuildOnline in December 2006 to form CTSpace (almost the final act in a story of start-ups and mergers that burned its way through somewhere over £162m or c. $325m - see Investing in a dot.com/SaaS business: a history). CTSpace was subsequently acquired by the French software conglomerate Sword Group in December 2007 for a knockdown price, rumoured to be around £6.5m (then c. $13m).

Technorati Tags: Howard Koenig,Sword CTSpace,Aruspex,CEN,Citadon,BuildOnline,CTSpace,dot.com,SaaS,Sword Group

Putting the social into AEC development

I have been following posts on a blog hosted by PTC, a vendor of product development technology solutions to 'discrete manufacturers'. Its product lifecycle management (PLM) applications are widely used in the industrial, high-tech, aerospace and defence, automotive, consumer and medical device sectors. OK, not my usual industry interests, but useful nonetheless as the blog posts are about how multi-disciplinary teams can use technology - and web 2.0 technologies in particular - to share and develop their product ideas.

And earlier this month, I got a news release from PTC about how its Windchill ProductPoint could be integrated with Microsoft's SharePoint system to extend the SharePoint capabilities to work with complex CAD and structured product data, while also enabling social computing. PTC's Rob Gremley says:

“Social product development is the next step in the evolution of how people work together. The idea that social product development was ever considered to be a new and revolutionary model will seem inconceivable to the next generation of engineers who have grown up with social networking as a normal vehicle for information sharing. Organizations that are able to harness the power of social computing in their product development strategy will quickly outpace their competitors with greater operational efficiency and ultimately better products.”

An AEC opportunity?

It is widely held, I think, that the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector lags behind technological developments in other industries, including manufacturing. PTC is already showing the way it believes manufacturing businesses can achieve a competitive advantage, so I wonder how long it will be before AEC firms begin to embrace social media as part of their technology stack to improve their operational efficiency and deliver better buildings and other assets?

Some have begun to adopt the tools and techniques (I have mentioned Fielden Clegg Bradley's adoption of Wikis, and have blogged on pwcom2.0 about HOK's use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter - see post and follow-up guest post), but for many AEC firms, social media is either shunned or only grudgingly tolerated - and even then perhaps simply for PR, marketing or recruitment purposes. Few have embraced Web 2.0 whole-heartedly and - perhaps apart from AEC integrations with SharePoint, the Kalexo platform I reviewed earlier this year, and Asite's new community portal - we remain some way from incorporating social computing into everyday professional interaction in the AEC sector.

Technorati Tags: blog,PTC,product development,discrete manufacturers,product lifecycle management,PLM,web 2.0,Windchill ProductPoint,Microsoft,SharePoint,CAD,structured product data,Rob Gremley,social product development,architecture,engineering,construction,AEC,social media,Fielden Clegg Bradley,wikis,pwcom2.0,HOK,Facebook,Twitter,PR,marketing,recruitment,Kalexo,Asite

More on BIM and IPD

Catching up with some reading over the weekend, I found this Constructech article: Integrated Project Delivery. Focused on the US market, it is a readable overview of the role that building information modelling (BIM) will play in supporting IPD, but also includes observations from users/vendors of pre-BIM information management systems (eg: Newforma, e-Builder) that facilitate project document workflows.

Relevant previous posts:

• Integrated Project Delivery - US guide (8 November 2007)

• BIM: All change please (18 February 2009)

• TEAM building and BIM (26 May 2009)

Technorati Tags: Constructech,Integrated Project Delivery,USA,building information modelling,BIM,IPD,Newforma,e-Builder

Asite upgrades and updates

In contrast with the somewhat depressing tone of my last post (Gloomy times for SaaS collaboration vendors), it's good to see UK SaaS collaboration vendor Asite being upbeat. The company has just upgraded its platform with its Summer 09 release, which also involves a major upgrade to the Asite website (incorporating a significant amount of social media capability). And Asite has also issued a trading update based on (unaudited) figures for the year to 31 December 2008 that show the company's revenues continuing to grow, despite suffering a hit in the second half of the year.

Interactive community

The new website now features an 'Interactive Community area' with blogs, discussion forums, a wiki and Twitter feeds. I really have to congratulate Asite on this move. It is something that I wanted to deliver while I was BIW Technologies but development priorities there were more focused on expanding the capabilities of the core system (I did, however, manage to establish a BIW blog, set up an RSS news feed and start a BIW Twitter feed).

As I write on a Saturday afternoon, the Asite community is a little light on content, but as most UK users return to work on Monday morning, hopefully the site will soon begin to feature good levels of interaction between community members. Asite CEO Tony Ryan has written the first blog entry welcoming users to the new site (a development he said was coming "shortly" a year ago - see post), while marketing manager Karl Williams has started seeding the discussion forum with some content.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the Asite Community develops and to see what impact (if any) this has on its relationships with its user community and other stakeholders.

Trading update

The Asite trading update shows gross revenues for 2008 up 14% to £1.89m from £1.658m in 2007 (see Asite finally returns to growth), with pre-tax losses more than halved, down to £0.233m from £0.518m. Based on the half-year figures announced last September (see Asite continues ascent) - covering a period before the global financial crisis really began to cripple the AEC market - I had anticipated that Asite might have broken even, but the healthy growth seen in the first six months (29%) clearly could not be sustained over the remainder of the year.

My gloomy forecasts in the previous post therefore appear to be justified. Over time, I expect the other UK vendors to report similarly difficult times.

Gloomy times for SaaS collaboration vendors

Today I have been hearing about redundancies among staff at one of the UK's leading construction collaboration vendors.

This news comes as no surprise. The writing has been on the wall for all the collaboration vendors since the credit crunch hit last year. Widespread project postponements and cancellations have led to corresponding reductions across the many firms of consultants, contractors and subcontractors reliant upon a steady throughput of new project opportunities, and businesses like 4Projects, Asite, Aconex and my former employer BIW will not survive unscathed. Only last month, discussing StoreData, I wondered if its sliding turnover indicated the impact the recession was having on collaboration vendors - even those targeting supposedly more buoyant segments of the construction market. And in the wider AEC computing market, Autodesk has so far announced over 1000 lay-offs worldwide this year (ignoring the alarming reports that it was no longer investing in its Constructware collaboration product - see Constructware conundrum continues).

It will be some months before we will be able to glean from their annual reports and accounts exactly what the impact of the recession has been on the main collaboration vendors, but the steady upward curve of the sector's turnover will certainly be interrupted. Hopefully some of the people affected by any redundancy programmes will quickly find new opportunities - but I suspect some will be lost to the construction/property industry altogether.

(I know from my own experience that the general AEC market downturn has prompted belt-tightening across many areas of business expenditure. With less funds being devoted to marketing, PR and industry liaison, the attraction of being BIW's in-house corporate communications professional was dwindling. However, I was also being asked to provide strategic advice to other AEC firms on collaboration technologies and on social media for construction PR and marketing, so I worked with BIW to negotiate a mutually-beneficial exit from the company and re-establish my previous consultancy business, pwcom2.0 - see A new blog, a new direction.)

Technorati Tags: UK,construction collaboration,4Projects,redundancies,credit crunch,project postponements,cancellations,Asite,Aconex,BIW,StoreData,Autodesk,AEC,PR,marketing,social media,blog,pwcom

E-business penetration of AEC industry

Having completed a PhD in the 1990s and got lots of support from people in completing questionnaires and doing interviews, etc, I vowed that I would return the favour when approached by other researchers. Ever since, I have supported numerous academics in their endeavours, and the latest is Star (Yongjie) Chen, a PhD research student supervised by my friends Kirti Ruikar and Pat Carrillo in the Civil and Building Engineering Department of Loughborough University (Kirti was co-editor of the book e-Business in Construction, to which I contributed a chapter last year - see post).

Star is looking at e-business, and wants to establish the level of penetration of e-business in the UK construction industry, and to investigate trends within the industry in implementing e-business strategies. If you want to participate in this research project, the questionnaire is available here. This confidential survey will apparently take about 8-10 minutes to complete, and you can request a summary of the results.

Technorati Tags: PhD,research,Star Chen,Kirti Ruikar,Pat Carrillo,Loughborough University,e-Business in Construction,UK construction industry,questionnaire