Trimble in September of 2022 acquired B2W Software, which produces estimating and operations tech for the heavy civil construction industry.
The acquisition made B2W, which got its start in estimating and expanded later into software to extend the estimate into work-in-progress phases, part of the Trimble Construction One family of solutions. Trimble lacked a heavy/civil estimating solution to date, as its earlier estimating software acquisitions had focused on mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP).
One exception to this is the Quest Estimating product that came to Trimble in its 2021 acquisition of Lula Build.and rebadged as Quest Estimating. Due to various differences in the way common estimating processes run in South Africa and British-influenced regions versus North America, Quest is not marketed in North America. According to Trimble insiders in an IronPros debriefing recently, the software-as-a-service backbone of Quest, however, will likely be used as a utility to help deliver B2W as a single-tenant SaaS solution.
“Our goal is to bring B2W to market in a cloud-based, browser-based solution,” Trimble Product Director Johann Potgieter said. “Right now, B2W is still more of a desktop-based, Windows-based application. Quest is a SaaS, cloud-based application. So we will use some of our Quest cloud-based estimating elements to re-platform some of our B2W estimating elements. There could be a converging effort in the future.”
Cloud vs. On Prem and Subscription vs. Perpetual License
Potgieter’s remarks also suggest a change in the way B2W is sold. Prior to the acquisition, only about 20% to 30% of net new B2W sales were going into a cloud environment. The remaining percentage was housing their solution on premise and ostensibly purchasing a perpetual license to use the software.
“In the last B2W podcast, it was shared that our solutions will be deployed in the cloud to add value to our customers and end users, not solely to drive value to B2W as a vendor,” Trimble Vice President and Category General Manager Jon Fingland said in an email interview shortly after the acquisition was announced. “Trimble adheres to the same belief. No one chooses to be in the hardware, software, cloud and professional services business all at once.”
Substantial investment in marrying B2W with a SaaS architecture would suggest a version designed for on-premise use, offered into the intermediate future, will need to compete for research and development dollars with the cloud solution the company is leading with.
Still Single Tenant
The solution, even after being extended for the cloud using Quest’s architecture, be delivered as a single tenancy. This differs from many modern SaaS applications that are multi-tenant, where a single instance of the software is accessed by multiple customers at once, each with their own secure data set. Multi-tenancy is more efficient for the software vendor, and is associated with the highest profits and lowest cost to provide the software. An advanced single-tenant solution like HCSS can be almost as affordable for both the vendor and customer, but the customer gets the security of knowing they are on their own, unique instance of the technology.
“For us to go to true cloud with B2W, it would be moving to a multi-tenant system,” Potgeiter said. “For now, we will just transition some of the desktop interfaces to browser-based interfaces. We can’t commit to exact timelines, but we are looking to switch to a pure subscription-based model. We are moving away from perpetual, but we need to support our existing customers who do not want to immediately switch to a cloud-based application … there will be a big push towards this at the end of Q1 of 2023 and certainly by the end of 2023.”
Read more about what the B2W acquisition by Trimble can teach contractors about evaluating construction software on IronPros.
Potential Conduit for Connected Equipment Data
Trimble sees potential in B2W’s capabilities beyond estimating, and other parts of the B2W product could become central to the experience of users of Trimble Siteworks.
“We are interested in the operational functionality as well, and we see potential to tie our connected devices into that,” Potgeiter said. “A lot of the field solutions are not flowing into a centralized application—they are more like point solutions. We have never had this potential aggregator for all of our field devices. This could acquire data from Siteworks, our surveying applications and capture progress into our operational suite.”
In the immediate term, B2W solutions will likely be a part of an overarching effort to migrate software products Trimble has acquired onto a common data model so they can share data and pass business processes back and forth as seamlessly as a suite of applications designed to function together.
“The roadmap is that we embrace the Trimble Construction One concept and platform,” Trimble Vice President of Product Development at Viewpoint Dan Farner said. “The multiple solutions we provide—need to bring them together in a more cohesive manner.”
“Underneath the hood, we are doing something around messaging—notifications—and will use a common technology for distributing messages across different systems including to our API platform,” Farner told IronPros for our Trimble Construction One Product Deep Dive. “So each product will be using a common messaging mechanism.”
