Acquisitions and new products continue to briskly happen in the construction technology sector, including news from Oracle, Ground Penetrating Radar Systems (GPRS) and BuiltWorlds.

GPRS of Maumee, Ohio, announced July 30 that it has acquired Existing Conditions, a Boston-based provider of reality capture, 3D laser scanning, and drone imagery services for architects, engineers and contractors. The acquisition is the tenth for GPRS. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close by the fourth quarter of this year.

"We've kind of gone on this journey of intelligently visualizing the built world," said Jason Schaff, chief strategy officer at GPRS and SiteMap product executive. Traditionally, Schaff adds, "We visualize things underground, but we really want to double-down on our ability to visualize above ground. Rather than think we can do it best, we wanted to find someone who does it best and help them scale."

Existing Conditions is a 3D laser scanning, drone surveying and data management firm focused mainly on the Northeast region, although its customer base stretches nationwide.

"What I really liked about GPRS...  is that they're an operator," said Existing Conditions Founder and CEO Kurt Yeghian who joins GPRS as an executive in the deal. "They recognize that when it comes to ground up, we built a platinum brand with the best architects and building owner institutions in the country using us. It was really an exciting synergy."

Oracle's Primavera Unifier Accelerator, Now Set Up for Owners

Oracle released Primavera Unifier Accelerator August 6, with 65 pre-configured business processes. Primavera Unifier is designed to help building owners reduce their setup processes within Primavera, with Unifier Accelerator ready for custom reporting. The Unifier Accelerator configuration includes 250 out-of-the-box reports and dashboards to manage cash flow, forecasts, contracts, scope changes and project administration including daily reports and RFIs.

"We've taken on a hard task over the past six to eight months of trying to bring together all of this intellectual property we've developed and package that up into a set of preconfigured business processes with a bunch of standard reports and dashboards that are relevant across the project life cycle," says Mark Webster, senior vice president and general manager of construction and engineering at Oracle. "We think [this release] continues to provide the marketplace with a unique platform that can extend itself into numerous business challenges, but certainly with the accelerator pack, we're going to be able to dramatically improve the speed and time to value."

Oracle is also partnering with the the Project Management Institute and launching a PMI–Digital Construction Practitioner course via PMI's e-learning platform. 

BuiltWorlds Discusses Construction Tech's Future

BuiltWorlds, a network and organization of AEC professionals sharing knowledge about construction technology, held its Construction Tech Conference July 23 to 25 in Chicago. 

Jason Blumberg, CEO and managing director of Energy Foundry, an energy and clean-technology impact venture capital fund, outlined some of the problems an investor sees in a discussion of emerging energy storage technologies on the conference's day one Midwest Forum.

"For grid-scale lithium-ion storage, half the container of lithium-ion batteries can be empty because of expected burnout of the batteries," he said. "Operations and maintenance costs are too high on gravity storage right now. With Iron-Air storage, being tested now in Boston, battery rusting gets 13 cycles and then it can be useless. There are a lot of next-gen innovations at the testing phase that will work. Chemistry and mechanical problems simply take time to be solved."

Energy storage technologies have drawn attention in recent years as the needs grows for off-peak power to compliment clean power generation. Architecture and engineering firm SOM recently entered into a partnership with technology developer Energy Vault on the company's gravity-based energy storage technologies.