As a software developer, Cadcentre has led the industry with its Plant Design Management System, or PDMS solution. With the introduction of its latest acquisitions, FOCUS, VANTAGE and ASPECT, Cadcentre extended the reach of PDMS deeper into the plant production lifecycle by managing materials, project controls, management decision-making, estimating, engineering changes, and production of intelligent engineering schematics. Now Cadcentre is positioning itself as a full-service engineering IT service provider, offering consulting services to help its clients integrate their existing enterprise IT systems with Cadcentre's open-standard solutions. AECVision recently interviewed Peter Littleton, the President of Cadcentre, to find out more about this important transition.

Cadcentre is now a lifecycle engineering IT service provider, meaning you are now officially getting into the consulting business. Is this integration service really new or is it something you have offered all along?

I believe it's an evolution, from a Cadcentre standpoint. Over the past fifteen, twenty years or so Cadcentre has always been service and customer focused, so I would say we're evolving from being just a straight "software service" company into a much more engineering-IT consulting and implementation provider.

Recently Cadcentre acquired Open Plant. Is this the means by which Cadcentre's products became STEP-compliant?

We've been working on the STEP initiatives for the past five years, or ten—OpenPlant is another addition to that, which means that we'll continue to have an open environment as well as continue to work not only on the STEP but also on the POSC/CEASAR and EPISTLE types of standards and issues.

So you've been an active participant in the standards development process all along?

Yes, we've been working with PLANTSTEP here in the States and POSC/CEASAR in Europe and so forth for years. I think the benefits of OpenPlant is that it's a STEP/POSC, or EPISTLE thought-out repository which also will not just help from a data standpoint but hopefully it will help from a plug-and-play or openness standpoint too… we at Cadcentre believe we lead from a technology and a professional services vantage but fully realize that "one suit doesn't fit everybody," if you know what I mean. We have lots of legacy systems and various systems out there that we're going to have to interface and work with.

Is Cadcentre developing an ASP delivery model?>

We're working on that as we speak. As Richard Longdon, our CEO stated down at Daratech, we're working on several different ASP-type delivery models and probably will be rolling them out during the upcoming year.

Will this be the only delivery model, or just an alternative?

No, this will be supplementary.

And what is the advantage of the ASP delivery model?

I think the value of an application service provider type of delivery model depends on the function in the engineering continuum that people are trying to tap into. We're seeing much more web-based procurement applications and so forth, like Industria, and given that our focus is software for process, management and procurement to enable personnel to come in on a project need, I would see this as much more of an ASP type of demand as opposed to having the software loaded on an annual or semi-annual basis. It's "pay as you play."

Daratech reports that Cadcentre's number of software licenses per-customer has been lower in the Asia/Pacific region than elsewhere. Does Cadcentre's new strategic focus (on enterprise systems integration) help to improve this ratio?

I think if you look at our three business units (with Cadcentre Inc. here in the states, and then Cadcentre International for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia/Pacific), this year Asia/Pacific is our largest growing business unit. We've always found that companies in Japan and China and Malaysia and so forth normally start out with a smaller initial number of seats and then incrementally grow from there. So I would say that given our presence in Asia/Pac I would venture to guess that you will see our licenses per customer go up over the coming years.