A team of eight veterans of Oracle’s Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit have jumped ship and landed at the digital project delivery platform service, Aconex.
The late July exodus, which Aconex announced in a press release on Oct. 25, was led by Garrett Harley, who had been director of engineering and construction strategy for the unit for more than five years. The group was created to market and coordinate development and integration of Oracle’s enterprise project management and scheduling system, Primavera, which Oracle acquired in 2008. Harley now will serve as Aconex vice president of strategic accounts for the building sector.
Harley started with Primavera in 1997 after a brief stint as a Bechtel project controls engineer and came to Oracle as part of that acquisition. He brings with him now to Aconex seven former coworkers from Oracle whose new titles align them with sales, marketing and accounts management.
They include Guy Barlow, who now is Aconex global commercial director; Krista Lambert, senior product marketing manager; Matt Miller, regional sales manager; Jabin Higgins, professional sales consultant; Jared Swartz, inside sales representative; Jeff Russell, account executive, and Nicholas Haddad, account executive.
“These are folks that I have worked with for years, and keeping those teams together was important,” Harley said, adding that he and the others were ready for a change and were drawn to Aconex’s “Connected Cost” initiative, which launched in April as an addition to its project management platform.
He says Connected Cost is part of a broader set of linkages between functions the company envisions to extend its cloud-based, collaborative, centralized platform of services for project scheduling and management backwards into project financing and design phases, and forward through operations and maintenance and beyond.
“The way it feels here, we have people and teams who understand the industry’s problems and can translate that and put it into a platform where it is deployable,” Harley says.
Aconex was founded in Australia in 2000. “They wanted to create an online exchange for concrete. What grew out of that was a technology platform where you can connect all the trades and partners.” The company is listed on the Australia Securities Exchange under the ticker symbol (ACX). It now claims to have more than 70,000 user organizations in 70 countries.
Part of its business strategy is to give subscribers the ability to create project networks with unlimited numbers of users at no additional cost. “A lot of companies start off thinking for a project they will contain it to “X” number of user accounts," says Harley. "But as soon as you start going down the supply chain and all the subcontractors and vendors you need to touch, it tends to blossom to be much bigger than you originally intended. Our business model is unlimited."
