Cadcentre Group Plc, the design software supplier to the process and power industries, has paid 1.5m pounds ($2.3m) to acquire the intellectual property rights and data management software customer base of Kvaerner ASA, a Norwegian construction firm. The acquisition of Kvaerner’s Vantage software business represents another step in the Cambridge, UK company’s move away from 2D/3D design towards engineering software. This process started in September when Cadcentre paid 1.7m pounds ($2.8m) for Kvaerner’s Scopus project management package (CI No 3,749).
Vantage manages the large volumes of data associated major engineering projects like process plants and oil rigs. It uses workflow software to link engineers with information from building plans, running on Windows NT, Solaris or HP-UX with an Oracle database. David Gibson, project manager for Vantage, says it reduces error rate in connecting engineers, previously a manual process from over 10% to less than 1%.
Vantage, originally called ‘Facet’ has been developed jointly by Norwegian company Kvaerner and EI DuPont De Nemours, the US chemicals firm based in Wilmington, Delaware. Cadcentre will get three customers from the start, the two developers plus US firm Merck Pharmaceuticals. The three currently provide a revenue stream worth $1m per year, but Cadcentre aims to raise that to $32m within five to ten years, to match the revenue from its other plant design management software (PDMS).
