Headline
Subhead
(Source enr.com - Date 3/23/03)

By Judy Schriener

BuildPoint Corp. is retooling itself to evolve and thrive in the new economy. As part of the effort to deepen its technology and peel off more layers of sales and marketing, the board has accepted the resignations of three-fifths of its top management team. Gone from the Redwood City, Calif.-based e-commerce firm are Jim Piraino, president and CEO; Alec Neville, chief financial officer; and Steve Smith, vice president of sales and business development. Remaining are Florian Aalami, founder and chief technology officer, and Andre Taube, vice president of engineering. Replacements, all of whom will have more direct technology experience, reportedly will be named shortly. The new CEO, whom sources say is an Oracle Corp. veteran, is set to arrive in the next couple of weeks.

Aalami would not comment on the management changes.

As is the case with most of the surviving dot-coms, BuildPoint is responding to the marketplace's demands for more substance and less hype and p.r. BuildPoint has told customers that it is becoming more of a software company than a dot-com, which involves creating applications with more functionality that can be used enterprise-wide. A few months ago, BuildPoint flipflopped its sales and marketing/technology ratio (as have most Internet companies) so that now 70% of the firm's resources are in research and development.

BuildPoint and construction.com are strategic partners, and The McGraw-Hill Companies' Construction Information Group, of which construction.com is a part, is an investor in BuildPoint. BuildPoint's technology currently powers the F.W. Dodge online bidding tool in the Project Center on construction.com and provides e-commerce functionality for the Building Products Center on construction.com, which is powered by Sweet's.

What it means to the industry: Clearly the dot-coms that successfully navigate through the choppy post-crash waters are the ones that stop acting like dot-coms and start acting like traditional software companies. BuildPoint, like all of the survivors (so far), has gotten more serious about its product and is sending a message through its management shifts that it will be even more serious in the future. By the way, BuildPoint's closest previous rival, the shuttered ContractorHub.com, was sold and is supposedly making a comeback. Could get interesting.

But all customers care about are two things: Being able to do what they want to do and feeling secure that the company will be around for the foreseeable future. That's why the traditional software companies are making such inroads. People know and trust them and get the particular applications that they are used to using (scheduling, accounting, project management, etc.) bundled in with Web functionality. As the dot-coms and traditional software companies evolve or team up to become mirror images of each other, the industry can only benefit.

BuildPoint probably started out as a solution in search of a need. Two years ago at A/E/C SYSTEMS, everybody "discovered" subcontractors and tried to make them their new best friends. Predictions were that the whole industry would be purchasing online in no time. Gradually most of those companies died painful deaths or un-dot-commed themselves. BuildPoint has struggled with the best of them. Founder Aalami has been promoted, demoted, shifted and retitled more often than a ship on rough seas, but he prevails and for BuildPoint, and for the industry, that's a good thing. Many of the founders of the other Internet companies in this industry haven't been as lucky.

© 2001 The McGraw-Hill Companies - All Rights Reserved