After Sword Group’s acquisition of collaboration vendor CTSpace (see CTSpace put to the Sword), the home page of the CTSpace website carried news of the change of ownership and promised “Our new website will be available in January”. It’s now February….
Update (5 February 2007): The French version of CTSpace’s website says the new site will appear in February – thanks, Emmanuel, who adds: “they have till the 29th this year ;)”. Update 2 (13 February): CTSpace now says “Our new website will be available soon”. Update 3 (7 March): new Sword and CTSpace websites are “scheduled to be available by end of March”.
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The french version of the CTSpace site mentions a website redesign for February… And they have till the 29th this year 😉
New website or not, I do not think this changes the new landscape of the AEC content collaboration space. Two companies globally have financial stability and resources to support just about any client engagement: Autodesk in the US (Buzzsaw and Constructware) and now Sword’s CTSpace across Europe and the US (BuildOnline and Citadon). They are the only ones with the financial resources that address clients’ main concerns (historically). Good luck to small players who now have to compete with these Autodesk’s $2.1B in sales and $870m in cash, and Sword’s $250m in sales and $200m in cash.
To recycle an old metaphor: size isn’t everything, it’s what you do with it that counts. Autodesk may have a business generating $2.1bn in sales, etc, but the vast majority of these revenues come from Autodesk’s non-SaaS operations focused on delivering design applications, not from the Buzzsaw and Constructware activities. I expect only a tiny fraction of Autodesk’s resources would ever be thrown behind its AEC collaboration activities, particularly as Autodesk would not want to jeopardise the substantial revenues that come from delivering conventional software.
Given that Sword only acquired CTSpace in December, it is too soon to say to what extent it will resource the business. However, the Sword Group is something of a conglomerate with substantial business interests in other markets and – just like Autodesk – it will not want to sacrifice success in these other sectors by focusing large amounts of resource on CTSpace.
Parent financial stability and the power of the parent brand will, of course, offer some reassurance to some clients, but – if I was a potential collaboration customer – I would want to understand what resources were committed to the particular division or company offering the solution. I would also evaluate potential providers against several other criteria: functionality of the applications, speed and reliabiliity of delivery, quality of consultancy and support, long-term product road-map, etc.
Numerous other customers have obviously also decided that size isn’t everything. Autodesk’s collaboration offerings face stiff competition from much smaller companies, including, in the UK, BIW, 4Projects and Aconex (among others), and in the US, solutions from eBuilder and Meridian, for example. Clearly, financial stability isn’t the sole criterion – if it was, Autodesk would be the dominant force in the market, which it ain’t!
Finally, even if your financial stability and resources argument was correct, I would say that there are more than two. You could, for example, add Bentley (ProjectWise) and Trimble (owner of Meridian, which has ProjectTalk, Proliance and Prolog).
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