First in June, and again yesterday, I wrote about Newforma and its Project Center product for AEC project management. The first article included this provocative passage about the Application Service Provider (ASP) model used by several project management products:
“Adds Newforma CEO Ian Howell, ‘It is clear to me that the ASP experience has no positive traction in AEC.’ This from a man whose resume includes stops at Cephren and BlueLine Online. ‘Users don’t like separate security setup and they don’t like storing their documents on the Internet. It becomes redundant with what is on the central server.’
You bet I got email in response. One of those replying was Amar Hanspal, vice president of collaboration solutions at Autodesk. I didn’t follow up to report or comment on the replies in June, so today I contacted Hanspal again. He still takes strong exception to Newforma’s characterization of ASP’s for project collaboration in AEC.
“I find the original comments attributed to the folks at Newforma (“ASP experience has no positive traction in AEC”) both mystifying and not borne out by facts,” Hanspal says. “At Autodesk, we have seen our collaborative project management solutions—Autodesk Buzzsaw and Autodesk Constructware—gain significant traction. This month, for instance, we clocked our 185,000th paying user.” According to my calculations, that number puts Autodesk up an additional 19,000 paying users since the Constructware acquisition. Those new customers represent more than half of Constructware’s total user base before the acquisition, and more than 10% of the total customer base. I think Hanspal’s rebuttal of Newforma’s “no positive traction” is well taken.
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--RSN