Dodge Data & Analytics Buys Firm To Improve Construction Data Usability
Fifteen years ago, estimators still used Dodge “plan rooms” to pull blueprints to work up bids. The digital revolution transformed the space.
PHOTO BY TOM SAWYER/ENR
Construction information service provider Dodge Data & Analytics is taking a new tack to provide intelligence to the construction and building-product manufacturing industries. By acquiring Ingenium Technologies Corp., Dodge plans to help its customers better integrate Dodge data into workflows.
“Dodge has always been about news and being the most comprehensive source of construction intelligence in the marketplace, but [we] didn’t really leverage it the way the customer consumes it,” says Dodge CEO Mike Petrullo. “We weren’t integrated into customer workflows in any real way.”
For more than 15 years, Vancouver-based software developer Ingenium, acquired on March 23, had a loose partnership with Dodge, creating and supporting tools to make it easier to use Dodge data. But development was uncoordinated, especially after 2005, when Dodge set out to build its own web-based digital data network.
“For the first five years, we were the only source for internet development for Dodge customers,” says Tim Waal, Ingenium’s vice president for products and sales. “Then, Dodge started to move into that space. The partnership survived, but it meant I had to change focus to gap-fill. We are able to expand and manipulate and deliver quite a lot of return in integration of Dodge Data. We turned that into a very successful business and, lately, have been getting heavily into mobile programming.”
Says Petrullo, “They supply a strong and important bridge into how our customers want to consume data.” He says no management changes are planned with the absorption of Ingenium and its 30-person staff, of whom Waal says 20 are in product and technology development.
DD&A’s forbearer, the F.W. Dodge Co., founded in 1891—as well as several other construction information providers—was under the same ownership as Engineering News-Record, until both were acquired by the Symphony Technologies Group, Palo Alto, Calif., in November 2014. Petrullo came on board at that time. Then, last summer, ENR was spun off to Troy, Mich.-based BNP Media.
The old Dodge was a paper-based news service that discovered and reported project leads to contractors and building-product manufacturers. It labored since the late 1990s to become the building-product manufacturer’s digital dashboard, tying leads to product sales and supply-chain opportunities. During the effort, investment in a sister property, the Sweets Catalog, founded in 1906, fell behind. “Sweets was put to the background and almost ignored,” says Petrullo.
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Now, following the acquisition of Sweets and Dodge by Symphony, Sweets is getting resources, too. In January, Dodge announced a strategic partnership with Global Product Data LLC, which, on March 11, led to the launch of a Sweets plug-in for Autodesk Revit. It integrates the green Sweets icon onto the Revit toolbar, linking Sweets building-product data directly to Revit’s design-tool interface.
“We’re in the process of revolutionizing the Sweets product,” says Petrullo. “It still has phenomenal brand recognition. It needed to be integrated into the workflow.”
