Former UK BIM Task Group head Mark Bew, also co-founder of the PCSG consultancy business acquired by Bentley Systems in 2020, has stepped down as CEO of Bentley’s Cohesive group. The opening day of Bentley Systems Year In Infrastructure 2023 event in Singapore has seen several new senior executive appointments. Inevitably that also means some familiar names have moved. Almost exactly three years after announcing the acquisition of PCSG, the UK-based consultancy chaired by former UK BIM Task Group head Mark Bew (19 October 2020 EE post), Bentley Systems has revealed that Bew has moved in ..read more

At an in-person London event, UK-based collaboration technology Revizto gave insights on efficiently implementing technologies. Today, Extranet Evolution is at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, attending a briefing to learn more about Revizto, an integrated collaboration platform for architecture, engineering and construction. According to a nearby banner stand, Revizto provides a “single source of communication for all disciplines, all stakeholders, from any location and any device”. The ‘Revizto unplugged’ event aims to give a global view of the UK-based company’s technology del ..read more

Thanks to mobile apps such as Buildiro, Skrap and now TeekIt, London streets are increasingly busy with deliveries of equipment and materials to construction sites, large and small.  In late 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, ExtranetEvolution wrote about Skrap, a northwest London-based startup that was aiming to transform waste skip and construction equipment hire services across the construction sector (September 2020 – Skrap: automating construction hire). The business, originally founded in 2017, had just raised £1.2m in seed funding and aimed to enable SME builders to order any const ..read more

Email management services company MailManager has been acquired by compliance software business Ideagen in a deal worth nearly £30 million. The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector has long been heavily dependent on email correspondence, despite the opportunity to move some communications to alternative workflow and document collaboration platforms. One business solution that thrived in this environment was MailManager, originally developed as a standalone application by a team at UK consultancy Arup (read June 2020 post, AEC reliance on email remains high, Mail Manager res ..read more

UK Government is aiming to make open, standardised data drive an improved local plans system. Legislation will ensure data is delivered in consistent formats, and make some data publicly available and reusable. In June, I attended a Manchester conference, Digital First (previously Digitech) – the Crown Commercial Service’s annual technology showcase. My presence at the event was mainly in relation to the work of the GIIG (formerly, the Government & Industry Interoperability Group).* I was part of a panel discussion on how interoperability might help to improve the delivery of built or man ..read more

Autodesk Forma is positioned as a cloud-based platform that will unify workflows for those that design, build and operate the built environment, but could those users also end up ‘caged’? Earlier this month (see its 8 May 2023 news release) and ahead of Digital Construction Week in London, Autodesk unveiled the first set of capabilities of Autodesk Forma. In Autodesk’s words, this is “an industry cloud that will unify workflows across the teams that design, build and operate the built environment”. The Forma backstory Forma was initially announced at Autodesk University in New Orleans in Sept ..read more

An interoperability code of practice for technologies in the built and managed environment is set to be launched on Monday 17 April in London. Poor interoperability of information has been a perennial problem for professionals in architecture, engineering, construction and asset operation and maintenance for decades. When I wrote my book, “Construction Collaboration Technologies: An Extranet Evolution”, in 2005, I looked forward to a rosy collaborative future encompassing BIM, real-time collaboration, mobile technologies, and rich integration with back-office and others systems. There has bee ..read more

Asite has made its first major acquisition under CEO Nathan Doughty, buying one of the UK’s most innovative independent construction software developers, 3D Repo. Independent London, UK-based Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration technology developer Asite has announced (5 April 2023) the acquisition of 3D Repo, also London-based, and a pioneer in cloud-based BIM collaboration software. Asite says the deal (no value disclosed) “brings together two innovative companies with complementary technologies and expertise, with the aim of driving digitisation in construction to new heights ..read more

Dublin, Ireland-based Evercam has raised a total of €8m investment to help it further grow its presence in Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific. As previously covered in EE (read April 2020 post: Evercam : site imagery, AI and BIM), Dublin, Ireland-based company Evercam provides cameras for construction sites to provide regular feeds of images that can also be used to create time-lapse and project management video sequences. Established in 2010 by Marco Herbst and Vinnie Quinn, the company looked at various potential applications of high resolution cameras and since 2017 has been ..read more

Part of Hull, UK-based 55 Group, contract change management tech provider Sypro has expanded its offering and teamed up with Trimble Viewpoint.  Sypro expand contract range At the recent UK Construction Week 2022 in Birmingham, I had a brief catch-up with Simon Hunt, CEO of Hull, UK-based Sypro. His company was established some 15 years ago, around the same time as several of the leading UK  document collaboration providers (including Asite and Aconex, plus BIW and 4Projects as they were then known, and Sword-CTSpace) were also developing SaaS contract process management toolsets ..read more