EXTRANET NEWS *
Published Weekly
Editors: Joel Orr, N'omi Orr, Stephen
Orr
http://www.extranetnews.com
1. CITADON: Going for the
2. The List
3. Tidbits
4. Quote of the Week
1.
CITADON: Going for the
EXTRANET NEWS interviewed Tom Glenwright,
Citadon’s director of marketing. Check out
http://www.citadon.com.
Citadon, once the lion of the extranet season, seemed to have gone quiet.
With supporters like Bechtel behind it, this far-seeing pioneer had been poised
to assume the mantle of “king of the extranet vendors.”
[Industry watchers will recall that its predecessor firms were Cephren (formerly Blueline
Online) and Bidcom. The two combined in the midst of
the dotcom decline.]
Shortly thereafter, it was clear that austerity measures were
called for. Much of the sales staff was let go, advertising and marketing
greatly reduced, and the firm hunkered down to attempt to weld together the
powerful but different products of Cephren and Bidcom.
“As we announced last year, we have been focusing on the industry
segments where we’ve had most success,” said Glenwright.
“These include oil and gas companies, owner/operators of process plants, power
companies, and firms and organizations that are involved in the transportation
infrastructure.”
Focusing on enterprise implementations having at least five large
projects at a time, Citadon turned firmly away from
the market addressed by the more project-oriented offerings of Constructware and Autodesk.
In January, the fruits of the belt-tightening began to be
revealed. Citadon released Citadon
CW (collaboration workspaces).
The new product is not a stitched-together combination of the
software of the former Cephren and Bidcom. It is a new product, from the ground up – designed
to be far more scalable and flexible than its predecessor products.
“It comes in two versions – pure Web, and Windows client. We
decided to offer the latter because customers missed features such as
drag-and-drop and right-click. Also, a Windows client’s performance is much
better, because it doesn’t have to redraw the whole screen for each update –
which browsers do,” said Glenwright.
Citadon CW is highly configurable, via forms and rules, and comes with
plenty of templates; typical ramp-up is 60-90 days. “We use the same APIs that
we make available to our customers,” said Glenwright.
While a few customers with extreme security concerns demand
behind-the-firewall installation, most use the service as designed, via Exodus
– the recently bankrupt, and now Cable & Wireless-owned, data center. “They
provided excellent service with not a hiccup through their bankruptcy, and are
now supported by a powerful large company.”
With 80 employees and 50 contractor/developers (some in
This major player will be
around for a long time, and the new product sounds like a winner.
2. THE LIST
Total companies: 235 (see
who’s on The List at http://www.extranetnews.com)
ADDED:
* Axista
XcollaT; team and enterprise project collaboration.
3. TIDBITS
* The seminar
"Introduction to Lean Construction" will be presented in
* PTC co-sponsors MSI
magazine's Executive Seminar Series presentation, A Conversation With Jack Welch, airing on April 16,
* Good KM discussion:
http://www.gantthead.com//Gantthead/discussions/discussionsTopicList/1,1327,803,00.html
* “AEC Intranet Cookbook” now available from ZweigWhite,
http://www.zweigwhite.com. We’ll review it as soon as we can.
* Check out CADwire: Go to http://www.cadwire.net for a daily dose of well-organized news, press releases, and
commentary from Joel and his associates in Cyon
Research Corporation.
* Spend time with industry and media leaders in a resort
environment. “The best industry event in 20 years!” agree most attendees.
REGISTER NOW: COFES 2002 - The Third Congress on the Future of Engineering
Software is scheduled for May 2-5 at the
* Coming up soon: AIA Technology in Architectural Practice Spring
Conference: Six Degrees of Collaboration
See http://www.aia.org/pia/tap/conference/schedule.asp for details.
* The American Institute of
Architects 2002 National Convention and Expo;
* Attend A/E/C SYSTEMS 2002,
4. QUOTE OF THE WEEK
An ounce of example is
worth a pound of theory.
- Unknown