InEight gives customers flexibility with cloud deployment options
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When multi-billion-dollar construction projects are running behind schedule and over budget, it can be difficult to recover. The sooner a team can identify and course-correct, the more successful they’ll be.
Construction management software company InEight was born from the need to improve real-time visibility at every stage of a construction project from design to estimate and from field execution to turnover. With this visibility, companies have the information and insights needed to improve operational efficiency and control project costs.
“InEight’s charter is clear,” explains InEight’s EVP of Marketing, Tad Bungener. “We help construction companies achieve project certainty. We provide them with the tools, so they have the information they need when and where they need it. This allows companies involved in construction to make more informed decisions, reduce risks and consistently realize projects that come in on time and on budget.”
InEight focused on creating flexible and expandable suites of software, covering disciplines across project cost management, field execution, project administration and project information modeling, all with actionable insights informing critical decisions across the project lifecycle. It took InEight more than two and a half years and countless development hours to bring its vision to life as InEight Project Suite and InEight Model Suite, both unveiled earlier this year.
“InEight Project Suite and InEight Model Suite are huge leaps forward for the construction industry,” says Dan Hicks, InEight’s COO. “Construction professionals now have access to tools that provide everything from mobile platforms to benchmarking and forecasting.” Increasing efficiency and reach with Azure In 2015, InEight’s technology consisted of on-premise point solutions. However, InEight leaders wanted to provide construction professionals with flexible options, including on-premise, hosted, and cloud-based offerings.
“We saw the need for a cloud-based solution that didn’t require a lot of heavy lifting for our customers,” says Tad. “Our customers are interested in cloud-based solutions because they require less infrastructure, can be deployed faster, and provide ready access to data, which is critical when a huge portion of your workforce is in the field.”
After researching cloud solutions, InEight selected Microsoft’s Azure platform.
“Microsoft brought a depth of resources that exceeded our expectations,” Dan says. “The Microsoft team worked closely with us to enable our construction management software to operate either on-premise or in a traditional cloud model, which allows us to give our customers options in deploying our solution. Also, the ability to natively integrate with Dynamics 365 created a natural way for us to expand our business intelligence capabilities.”
InEight Project Suite, powered by Azure, has expanded InEight’s market opportunities. The company is now able to provide flexible options to meet the individual needs of its customers. It gives InEight a stronger solution to more efficiently go to market and drive more value for its customers.
“InEight Project Suite is attracting a lot of interest, especially with large enterprises. We’re talking to global customers that candidly, we wouldn’t have before the introduction of these suites and the cloud capabilities through Microsoft,” explains Dan.
“The responsiveness and nimbleness of technology that we’ve embraced in the Azure platform allows us to provide higher-performing solutions to the market,” Dan says. “InEight Project Suite is nimble enough to react to market demands and the needs of our customers.”
From weeks and months to minutes and hours While cloud infrastructure provides InEight’s customers with a flexible option, it has other clear advantages. For example, cloud infrastructure makes automating builds and embracing a DevOps mentality possible, something that would take weeks in an on-premise environment.
The cloud allows InEight to be agile. “We’re onboarding some large global customers via the cloud. With Azure, we’re able to dramatically cut install cycles and move from agreement to live solution much more quickly,” says Dan.
With the Microsoft tech stack, the InEight team can quickly stand up new environments across the globe, which results in significant savings.
“From a DevOps standpoint, we now handle a much higher volume of demand with ease and have dramatically increased our operational efficiency,” says Tad. “The resources, number of people, and amount of time it took to stand up a new client historically would have made it challenging to expand our customer base quickly. With Azure, the team is positioned to support our rapid grow and expand our solutions capabilities.”
Looking to the future Construction management software has the power to enable construction companies to make data-driven decisions and more effectively manage change.
“In the construction industry, it’s all about using information to manage margins,” says Dan. “If you can get closer to predicting outcomes based on current and historic data, you can maximize the margins and minimize the risk.”
“The construction industry is interesting in that the newest tech sort of just circles the periphery, while the clear majority of companies are still working off spreadsheets,” says Tad. “Despite lagging adoption, technology will be the transformative factor in solving for long-standing and fundamental productivity issues.”
InEight helps companies aggregate data to make more informed decisions, and the company is working on innovative approaches to this. Next generation building information modeling (BIM) solutions through InEight Model Suite visually represent project data within 3D renderings or models for highly-valued context. Through InEight Model Suite, the team has helped companies enrich their models with design documents, earned value, planned schedule, procurement status, safety trends, quality checks, and millions of other available project data points to provide each stakeholder with a comprehensive view of every project.
This aligns perfectly with InEight’s goal to provide a common platform where data can be trusted as the single source of the truth, and project stakeholders can rely on that data to be harmonized across all discipline-oriented applications.
“The unique value we bring to market is in providing a proven, interoperable, and flexible application environment that stands on a highly-scalable tech stack. This allows our customers to consume the tech that solves today’s problems while preparing them for the future,” says Dan.
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