BIW doubles profit and talks of flotation

BIW Technologies, the provider of online project control software, has doubled its pre-tax profit to £1.1m.

BIW has mooted the possibility of floating the business on AIM, the junior portion of the Stock Exchange, next year

The latest financial figures cover the 12 months to 30 September 2008.

In the previous year there was a £560,000 pre-tax profit on turnover of £5.7m. The latest turnover is higher at £8.4m.

The widely-used project software system is in use in the UK, Europe and Middle East. BIW’s IT platform has been deployed on over 10,000 projects to date and has accumulated a user base of over 110,000 users, drawn from more than 11,000 different organisations involved in the planning, procurement, design, construction and ongoing operation and maintenance of built assets.

BIW has offices in London, Dubai and India.

BIW customers include:

• United Utilities
• Sainsbury’s
• BAA
• Marks & Spencer
• UK Ministry of Defence

Additionally, the list also carries the names of:

• Mace
• Bovis Lend Lease
• Kajima
• Gleeds

BIW says that users divide on a 50:50 basis into two camps:

• Construction clients
• Construction firms/project managers

The group has developed a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that is increasingly opted for by new clients. SaaS was previously known under the title of ASP (Application Service Provision).

The SaaS operational methodology has the advantage that a customer who doesn’t want to invest up-front in hardware doesn’t have to spend big-time and in addition it by-passes the need for a big spend in up-front licence fees.

Google offers a SaaS methodology which is restricted to handling email applications, document solutions, spreadsheets and Powerpoint.

Others offer SaaS systems that are focused on financials.

The BIW SaaS delivers project software over the web to browsers. Project data is hosted in space taken in a remote but secure data centre.