Now that Silicon Valley tech company Trimble Inc. has agreed to acquire Portland-based Viewpoint Construction Software from Bain Capital for $1.2 billion (all cash), the business blend begins.

Viewpoint Construction Software was founded in 1976. Bain Capital, a Massachusetts private equity firm, invested $230 million in the company in 2014 before selling to Trimble just four years later, almost to the day.

Trimble, based in Sunnyvale, California, specializes in GIS mapping, data collection and integration, as well as construction and other software and hardware products. The deal follows the company’s February acquisition of Florida-based e-Builder and its portfolio of construction software.

Now, Viewpoint, following a year in which it experienced 30 percent growth, is poised to help Trimble cover all construction aspects under one software roof.

“What we’ve done at Viewpoint in the last few years is we created a great vision of bringing together office, team and field,” Viewpoint CEO Manolis Kotzabasakis said.

The office refers to the business end, including accounting and payroll, he said. The team is the entire team of companies and contractors involved, while the field is the jobsite and those actively working on a project at a given time.

“Having information across all three areas is very important to our customers,” Kotzabasakis said. “The last few years we’ve made that vision more clear.”

The acquisition by Trimble, he added, is intended to aid this work by adding that company’s technology – hardware and software – into the mix.

“We have a number of good technologies that we’ll be looking at to see how we could potentially bring them together,” Kotzabasakis said. “But it’s early days.”

Viewpoint grew to prominence in recent years with a suite of software that integrates a contractor’s financial and resource management with project operations at the jobsite. This allows the end user to manage data and workflows that span the construction life cycle from pre-production planning to project handover and beyond.

Now, officials are looking to blend that with Trimble’s wealth of experience in heavy equipment, autonomous vehicles, operator tool telemetry, smart tools and more.

“It’s not a secret that the construction industry lags behind most other major industries in pursuing advanced technologies to improve their productivity,” Mark Sawyer, Trimble’s director of construction industry strategy, stated in response to questions submitted via email. “But construction projects, whether they’re new commercial buildings or new public infrastructure projects, are complex, one-off endeavors, so it’s not as simple as buying a piece of technology and reaping instant benefits.”

The key is creating that one umbrella for the vast amount of information.

“We believe the opportunity to transform the industry lies in the coordinated management of information at all phases of the project and across many constituencies,” Sawyer stated. “We call that our construction life cycle strategy.”

Trimble’s recent acquisition of e-Builder provided additional planning and information management capability across both the private and public sectors. Viewpoint gives the company additional resource management and information management capability specifically for general and specialty contractors.

“They already had several important components of that continuum Manolis described,” said Matt Harris, Viewpoint’s chief product officer since 2011. “They were missing the systems contractors … use to coordinate their businesses and collaborate their offices with team activities and jobsite activities, and that’s where Viewpoint comes in.”

Viewpoint has built its reputation around a comprehensive suite of construction management software branded under the “office, team and field” banner. The firm has developed the means of integrating everything from estimating and bidding to managing and archiving.

“The ability to surface real time, or near real time construction project data into an owner-facing portal, that, in and of itself, we think will revolutionize the industry,” Harris said. “Those are the types of capabilities we have at our fingertips.”

Trimble does not yet have information to release about future products or plans, according to Sawyer.

“While it’s too early to make detailed statements about product development, we can say that our goal is unchanged,” he stated. “That is to offer a central workflow platform for delivering integrated, end-to-end construction solutions that will improve data flow across the complete construction life cycle.”

Viewpoint employs more than 700 local staffers and says it plans to stay in Portland along with the current executive team. Around half of the employees work at the company’s headquarters near the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge. The unit will continue operating under the Viewpoint brand for the foreseeable future.

This alone makes it a net positive for the city, Harris said.

“I think this is the great outcome for Viewpoint,” he said. “We have what we would consider our final home, so to speak, from an ownership perspective. Trimble is a demonstrated business operator – they invest in critical technology and platforms to enable automation in construction.

So we think it’s great for Viewpoint and we also think it’s a great outcome for Portland.”

Also, there is little to no overlap of business delivered by Trimble, Viewpoint and e-Builder, according to Kotzabasakis.

“It’s really complementary technologies,” he said.

So Trimble’s acquisition of Viewpoint made sense to both customers and shareholders, he said.

“It was an easy decision, if you want,” he said. “We have been getting inquiries about the company for a long time, and recently those inquiries increased significantly for three reasons.”

The first, he said, is that sales bookings in 2017 exceeded those in 2016 by 30 percent. The second is an attractive vision of “office, team and field.” The third, and most fundamental, is the digital revolution in construction.

At the end of the day, Kotzabasakis said, Trimble had the most attractive offer both financially and in terms of company culture and vision.

“They have dirty boots and hats in their DNA,” he said. “And we felt this is the right home for Viewpoint and the future of our technology and the benefits our customers are expecting from us.”

Harris agreed.

“Being part of something that really puts Portland on the map from a tech perspective and delivers this much impact on the industry on a global scale,” he said, “is something I think many of us are really quite proud of.”

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California tech company Trimble Inc. has agreed to acquire Portland-based Viewpoint Construction Software from Bain Capital for $1.2 billion – all cash.

Trimble, based in Sunnyvale, California, specializes in GIS mapping, data collection and integration, as well as construction and other software and hardware products. The deal follows the company’s February acquisition of Florida-based e-Builder and its portfolio of construction software.

Viewpoint Construction Software was founded in 1976 in Portland. Bain Capital, a Massachusetts private equity firm, invested $230 million in the company in 2014 before selling to Trimble just four years later, almost to the day.

Viewpoint grew to prominence nationally with its suite of software that integrates financial and resource management with project operations on the jobsite. This allows the user to manage data and workflow that span the construction life cycle from pre-production planning to project handover.

The company has been leading a push to move the construction industry out of the analog era, according to Viewpoint CEO Manolis Kotzabasakis.

“The construction industry is embarking on a major digital transformation,” he stated in a news release issued Monday.

Viewpoint currently has an estimated 8,000 customers worldwide – primarily heavy highway and civil contractors, general contractors and specialist subcontractors.

The company employs more than 700 local staff and says it plans to stay in Portland along with the current executive team. Around half of Viewpoint’s employees work at the company’s headquarters near the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge. It will continue operating under the Viewpoint brand for the foreseeable future.

“Our operations will remain headquartered in Portland and our global offices will remain as they are,” Viewpoint spokeswoman Simmi Singh Corcoran said. “This is a great move for the construction industry. Trimble is a well-respected company and a leader in connecting the field to the enterprise, the transformation that construction is poised to make.”

The new partnership is a “perfect fit,” Kotzabasakis added, and will help construction companies further integrate digital operations as products from all three companies in the recent purchases are integrated across platforms and updated.

With Viewpoint software, for instance, users have a central workflow platform for end-to-end project management. In the future, Viewpoint will complement recently acquired of e-Builder products such as its cloud-based construction program management software. This will further extend the latter’s capabilities in the hands of general, specialty and heavy civil contractors and provide “end-to-end project transparency.”

Steven Berglund, president and CEO of Trimble, said the acquisitions are “strategically significant” and combine well with existing expertise.
“(They) position us to play a unique and central market role in providing comprehensive enterprise and project solutions,” he said.

The transaction is one of the largest ever involving an Oregon tech company. But it pales in comparison to a pair of deals done in recent years. Thermo Fisher Scientific closed on its purchase of Hillsboro-based FEI Corp. for $4.2 billion in 2016, and Siemens closed on its purchase of Wilsonville-based Mentor Graphics for $4.5 billion in 2017.

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