Bricsnet Sports a New Look, Targets Owners

February 20, 2000

By Judy Schriener

This week's relaunch of the Bricsnet NV Web site marked a watershed for the Belgium-based ASP (application service provider). The Web site's major facelift reflects its shifting focus from the design firms to owners.

Bricsnet's revamped Web site reflects its strategy to target owners

The new, streamlined black and white front page beckons building owners to discover "the difference between a building and an intellectual property," a difference Bricsnet believes its solution will provide to owners in the form of mission-critical data from every aspect of commercial building and operation. While many competing ASPs say that they too are going after owners, Bricsnet has put the owner literally front and center. The text on the front page addresses an imagined "you," obviously an owner, offering "complete insight and control over your building's every function." Owners are invited to "[s]ee how you can deploy buildings faster and operate them more cost-effectively." Gone is the text-heavy site index that used to pass as the front-page that divided the site according to catalogs, community, and services. "You" no longer have to scroll down the page to find what you want: Bricsnet's primary offerings are featured in three boxes running across the middle of the page, with operations management flanked by design and construction and materials selection.

As the research firm Daratech Inc. notes in a vendor profile on the company, a "central challenge for Bricsnet is to raise awareness of the potential business impact of better real estate and facilities lifecycle management within owner enterprises, together with the importance of IT [information technology] as a critical enabler of this." Bricsnet seems to have heard the message loud and clear.

The new look for the Web site comes after a rocky year that saw Bricsnet's stock price plunge along with the rest of the technology sector. As of Feb. 19, the stock has shed 86.54% over the last year and is down 21.25% since its IPO. So far, 2001 has been a different story, with the stock gaining 83.14% year-to-date and the company projecting revenues of $24,172,200, double that of 2000. That puts Bricsnet somewhere between e-Builder Inc., a McGraw-Hill Companies partner, which expects more than $10 million in revenue in 2001 and Buzzsaw.com Inc., an Autodesk Inc. venture, which expects more than $30 million in revenue.

Not only did the company ride the fickle waves of last year's overheated market, it also had to face the enormous challenge of integrating the eight business units it has acquired since its IPO on the EASDAQ (the pan-European equivalent of the NASDAQ) on June 30, 1999. As part of that integration, the company laid off 25% of the back office staff, a decision Bricsnet's Yoav Etiel, executive vice president, worldwide marketing, attributes to redundancies among the original company and its eight acquisitions. The downsizing left Bricsnet with 150 employees spread all over the globe, from corporate headquarters in Portsmouth, NH, and Gent, Belgium, to other offices located in California, Germany, France, Russia and Mexico.

New Look Complements New Approach

Yoav Etiel, executive vice president, worldwide marketing, joined Bricsnet from Bentley Systems, Inc. last September.

With the integration and the Web site redesign, Bricsnet intends to serve the same market from a different direction, targeting owners instead of architects and engineers. "I think that IT vendors, especially those who have historically focused on construction and real estate industries, have preferred to sell to design firms," Etiel says. "It was a push strategy--they will push the electronic format to the construction firm, who will push technology to owners, who will have to buy hardware and software to use that information for facilities management."

According to Etiel, the construction industry has not been spending money on information technology because solutions to date have catered to everyone but the owners. He puts it this way, "If someone came to paint your house and expected you to pay for better brushes for the painters, you'd laugh at them. But if they bring you better paint for your walls, you'll pay for it." Now owners are demanding that their needs be addressed, Etiel says, and there is a growing recognition among them that they deserve more: buildings are not being built fast enough and are not being operated efficiently enough and they see that technology can help. "Owners use a hodge podge of technologies in order to just get the technology they need," says Etiel. "There's no transparency to the process, and they can't make good decisions in real time. That's what sets Bricsnet apart."

That's a long way from where the company began in 1986, when founder and architect Erik de Keyser developed BricsWorks, a modeling software that combined geometry with building information. The business model in the late 1980s was to engage in OEM (original equipment manufacturer) agreements, most notably one with IBM, which took a 24% minority equity position in the company. The second agreement put BricsWorks in league with Bentley Systems Inc., which licensed BricsWorks and marketed it as Bentley's Microstation Triforma architectural modeling software. In 1999, Bentley decided to continue to develop Triforma on its own and the proceeds from that arrangement (Bricsnet retained the rights to the technology) allowed Bricsnet, which up until that time had been called Brics Architects, to shift into high gear and onto the Internet.

In rapid succession, Bricsnet acquired EVOLV, a Portsmouth, NH, company that specialized in creating Web-based tools for collaboration during the design and construction phase of projects. Next came AECInfo, Toronto, Canada, an AEC Web portal. With these acquisitions in hand and their vision for software expanding beyond just the design phase, de Keyser took Bricsnet public on EASDAQ at the height of 1999's dot-com IPO mania, raising $18.4 million on its first day of trading. That made it the first and so far only ASP focused on the engineering, construction, operations or E/C/O market to go public. The company saw its stock valuation sore, trading at more than $55 per share at its high in March 2000. Bricsnet used its wealth to make six more acquisitions, what Etiel characterizes as "long term strategic components, not just design and construction, but operation and management," including ARCAT, a provider of Internet product content and specification. In 2000, the company bought VISCOMM, a technology developed for facilities management and operations of commercial real estate. With the VISCOMM acquisition, Bricsnet entered a third phase, morphing from holding company to full-fledged ASP. It created a platform to integrate all three phases of the construction process-design, construction, and operation--into one ASP solution, Building Center.

While Bricsnet built itself into a global player through acquisition, the company's shopping spree, along with bull market that fueled it, is over, though Etiel won't rule out the possibility that Bricsnet will buy what it thinks it needs in the future. "The company has proven opportunistic in the past," he says, but for now the company is concentrating its efforts on exploiting the opportunity it perceives it has with underserved building owners.