With an announcement last week, Autodesk let it be known that it was going to get into the office management business with a “strategic investment” in iOFFICE + SpaceIQ.
iOFFICE + SpaceIQ is best known as the company that produces Archibus, the software that lets building managers and owners manage their workspaces and the assets within them.
“Combining design, operational and performance data and workflows in a single platform to improve the comfort, safety and efficiency of building assets has never been more important,” said Nick Stefanidakis, general manager, Archibus, an iOFFICE + SpaceIQ product. “The strategic investment from Autodesk allows us to deliver the solutions organizations need to meet this demand.”
It’s About COVID
When you finally tire of COVID-induced work from home, or your family’s demands of you during work hours, or your company drops its guard and wants everyone back in the office, you will very likely face a workplace that is not the same as when you left it—if you can find it at all. You may have to request a new office, workstation, cubicle … whatever. That office space you had by the window, the desk surface that you imagined repopulating with your framed family photos may have someone else occupying it. You should have read your back-to-work instructions, gotten up earlier, and booked a space. While you were working from home, the workplace has been transformed from one with a permanent space for you to one where you must now request a space—not unlike a hotel.
Cheer up. Be more like the happy people pictured on SpaceIQ.com. They are already used to “hoteling” and “hot desks,” and you too can learn how to settle in safely in your new workspace.
What Just Happened?
During COVID, companies grew tired of paying rent for empty expensive office spaces. They downsized. London-based research firm Verdantix predicted in June 2020—only months into the pandemic—that companies had already begun downsizing by an average of 50 percent. Who could blame them? A clear benefit of employees working from home had presented itself. Canada’s OpenText software would close half of its offices, assigning 2,000 of its employees to permanent work-at-home status. Nationwide Mutual Insurance, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, would shut down four of its U.S. offices, making 4,000 employees work at home permanently. The BBC announced that it would close 20 regional offices, citing the “success of remote working.”
But as time went on, as more employees got vaccinated and as more restrictions were lifted, office managers began facing a space crunch.
And the Future?
Futurists are predicting the workplace of the future is one that is flexible, more accommodating—a “hybrid workspace” that accommodates employees working at home to a varying degree, some all the way to always, except when they absolutely have to meet face to face, to three or four days out of five, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The “hot desk” is a critical component of dynamic office space allocation and a class of software now called IWMS, for integrated workspace management system. IWMS is built on the principal that all employees coming into work need only a place to plug in their laptop or attend a meeting in a conference room. All that workplace personalization? That’s just them feathering the nest. So yesterday. So permanent.
This fluid work environment, where no one gets permanent tenancy and everyone jockeys for desk space, invites a comparison to the hotel industry. Hotel booking software has long had to deal with who arrives late, who always gets the VIP treatment, who is entitled to the view, and so on, when doling out the rooms. IWMS vendors have been quick to capitalize on waves of employees reentering the workspace as vaccinations increase and the need for “hoteling” office space grows. Previously, IWMS was in limited use by employees and managers and was used mostly to help people book conference rooms.
How Does It Work?
The concept of IWMS is quite simple. Think of Airbnb, except that it’s for work, not vacation. Office managers can get a floor layout (very likely created in AutoCAD, Revit) and use it to make office spaces available to employees. Employees can check their smartphones in the morning for available space and reserve it, either for all day or part of the day. Common areas, like conference rooms, can be booked the same way. Presumably, managers can use IWMS to see where employees may be hiding.
What Is Autodesk Thinking
The combined company is a big bet that we all will be booking office space just as we book our hotel rooms. Covering the bet is Autodesk, a company best known for designing the buildings and spaces that companies like SpaceIQ and iOffice are known to manage.
As Autodesk’s “strategic investment” in iOffice + SpaceIQ is nonspecific (terms of the investment were not disclosed), knowing what Autodesk is up to is at best an educated guess. Without knowing how much equity Autodesk has in iOffice +SpaceIQ, we can’t tell if iOffice+ SpaceIQ will be controlled or guided, or simply whether Autodesk is only along for the ride.
However, in the normal progression of courtship in the software industry, the companies invariably steal glances (size each other up), exchange notes like high schoolers (emails), and form friendships (integrations). There is dancing (innocent Q&A) and dates (meetings), leading to an engagement (letter of intent) and then, finally, a marriage (merger or acquisition).
The partnership in this case does seem to signify that Autodesk is setting its sights past design, the company’s original reason for existence; past construction, its focus of late; to the long tail of a building or a facility’s lifetime, the whole time the building or facility is standing, and very importantly, the whole time it is making money. Who can fault Autodesk for wanting some of it?
Autodesk and Archibus (the primary product and former name of SpaceIQ) have long been friends. Revit, AutoCAD and Archibus readily exchange data and are tightly integrated. Autodesk states that with the strategic partnership, there will be more integrations with the Autodesk Construction Cloud and the Autodesk Forge platform.
About iOFFICE + SpaceIQ
iOFFICE, headquartered in Houston, merged with SpaceIQ, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. (commonly referred to as Silicon Valley), merged to form iOffice + SpaceIQ in August 2021. SpaceIQ was founded in 2016 and had been funded in three rounds for a total of $11.5 million between 2016 and 2018, according to Crunchbase. The merged company is owned by private equity firms, mainly Thoma Bravo and JMI Equity. Wain Kellum, CEO of SpaceIQ, became CEO of the merged company of Serraview and Archibus.
Archibus was founded by Bruce Forbes, credited as being the founder of an entire class of software initially called CAFM (computer-aided facilities management) before it became IWMS. Before CAFM, building owners and managers were “using Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and sticky notes to keep track of real estate and facilities management,” said Forbes, only half-jokingly, in a 2010 interview. Forbes, who had a master’s in computer science from Cornell and a master’s in architecture from Harvard, died in 2016.
Archibus was acquired by SpaceIQ. Archibus and Autodesk are long-time friends, as previously mentioned. Archibus was one of the first developers to build a full-fledged, specialized application on top of AutoCAD.
iOffice + SpaceIQ claim to have the lead in facility and asset management with more than 10,000 customers and 2 billion square feet of space worth over $64 billion. The main competition comes from FM:Systems, IBM’s TRIRAGA, Planon and Trimble, according to Gartner.