Among global, multi-industry software companies, Sage has seemed increasingly committed to contractors and the property sector with construction enterprise resource planning (ERP) options like Sage 100 Contractor, Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate and Sage Intacct Construction Edition.
Sage has demonstrated that it has multiple ways to extend these and other offerings with products that may be white-labeled—as it does with products from companies like Operix or Penta. So its acquisition of Huntington Beach, Cal.-based Corecon Technologies is notable in part because Sage has other options to if they want to add products to a line card.
Founded in 1999 in California, Corecon multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) construction software for preconstruction and project management Customer organizations include general contractors, construction managers, subcontractors and custom homebuilders.
“With construction businesses at different stages in their cloud adoption, it is important we provide technology that simplifies complex processes and helps them to work more efficiently and grow,” Sage Vice President Product Construction and Real Estate Julie Adams said. “This acquisition closely aligns with our drive to bring the latest cloud technology to our increasing number of construction customers. By combining our trusted financial solutions with innovative cloud preconstruction and project management capabilities, we will deliver a system that can run every part of a construction business.”
“Sage shares many of the same values and ambition as Corecon which makes it the perfect fit for our colleagues, products, partners and customers,” said Norman Wendl, CEO and Founder of Corecon. “We are excited about joining Sage on its journey to help deliver market-leading solutions to the construction industry. What’s more, the acquisition will allow our product suite to accelerate and reach new heights, benefiting our customers as well as their clients and business partners.”
Best-of-Breed vs ERP
With the rise of application programming interfaces (APIs) and cloud-native applications designed around the API, contractors and construction teams should find it easier to integrate these modern tools with each other than will be the case with legacy software applications. But there are still benefits that accrue when functionality used in different parts of the business or different phases of the project lifecycle, are designed to work more natively together. IRONPROS got a briefing from Adams in the days following the Corecon announcement.
IRONPROS: Why make this type of acquisition, into the value-creation side of the construction business, right now?
JULIE ADAMS: “So we've been in the construction industry for a long time, and we have a rich history in construction. And as we are working with our customers in the next wave of innovation, as we move to the cloud solutions, what we're hearing more and more from our customer base and from prospects is that they really want more of an end-to-end solution from, from Sage, because it is complicated to bring together a bunch of disparate systems and kind of make it all integrate and work together well. And sometimes they just want something included. So we really looked for a solution like Corecon to complement our deep financial tools and capabilities, and bring in native cloud reconstruction and project management as part of our overall end to end suite.”
Initially, Corecon will integrate with Sage Intacct. That Intacct integration was just made available a month or so ago, and it will go in our Sage Intacct marketplace partner area. The other thing is that we're going to integrate Corecon with is Sage 100 Contractor, and Sage 300 CRE as well, because we have a very loyal customer base on those products, and what they're able to do is leverage their technology investments in the solutions that they already know and love.”
