Up until now it’s been a black or white choice of “either” on premises “or” in the cloud.  Newforma is now offering the industry a new choice, which is: “and”.

ENR: We talked about Microsoft before. Google is offering a lot of what Microsoft does, but for free. That isn’t a worry for you that someone will come offer this service for free?

Howell: You’ve crossed an important line of distinction. That is what I call generic software versus a vertical solution. We’re very focused on the AEC and O market exclusively. It is about the specific needs of the construction industry. The information structures that we index and search cannot be discovered using Google’s Enterprise Search Appliance. It can’t find an X-ref file embedded in a DWG that’s inside a zip file that’s attached to an email that’s part of an RFI.  We follow that information path and we’ll find that X-ref file. Google doesn’t do that. It’s not a vertically oriented tool.