In May this year, Oxford Metrics announced the sale of its infrastructure asset management division, Yotta, to Causeway Technologies for £52m. Dominic Browne speaks to Yotta’s chief executive Nick Smee about a match made in market heaven and a change (not an end) to an era.
‘I have been through a few mergers and acquisitions in my time, both in highways and in other sectors, and the acid test is whether your customers need convincing – in this case, most of our customers are saying: why did it take you so long? It makes absolute sense for them,’ Mr Smee says.
The integration of Yotta into Causeway continues apace and from November the Yotta brand will be retired. A name that was synonymous with the asset management revolution is now set to be just ‘slips of the tongue’, as Mr Smee says in a nice turn of phrase.
The details of Mr Smee’s role within Causeway are still being finalised but we know that Yotta's Mayrise, Horizons and Alloy products will contribute to the wider Causeway software offer, which can now take its clients from design, through construction, to maintenance and asset management.
In a diverse client-side market (you might say fragmented and overly complicated if you wish), Causeway has realised a kind of software equivalent to ancient Rome - a place where all roads lead.
Mr Smee explains: ‘Adding Yotta, our products and people brings Causeway into the world of asset management. If we had done that 50 years ago road maintenance would be a lot easier today because authorities would know what was in their roads. So many of those records have been lost. But with Causeway, we are now able to take a data flow right through from design to construction to asset management and that journey and its efficiency of it is unique.
‘It will benefit Yotta’s traditional customers but also through construction, it will help term maintenance contractors, who will get rich data. We can bridge that gap in the relationship with the local authority and their contractors and have best-in-class technologies. Alloy, Horizons and Mayrise on one side with Causeway’s Project Accounting on the other, which is a real step forward for both audiences. It is a great vision - the idea you can take a digital journey from drawings to maintenance over many years, that is really exciting.’
This sounds great for Causeway. The good news for customers is because each of these products is distinct and part of a chain, there is no concern over any platform being discontinued – so no investment of time and money in the products will be lost client side.
Mr Smee does suggest there is the likelihood of, over time, the platforms being brought together into one: ‘I think it is a necessity over time. That is active within Causeway and was happening before Yotta - Yotta represents another leg in that process.
‘For some customers, it is absolutely right they will get huge efficiencies from rationalizing the number of suppliers and software products that they work with and rely upon. Other organisations, will want to dip in and out. So you want to offer the best of both worlds.
‘We knew that we needed to play nicely with lots of other organisations’ products – often a director of place or highways is not necessarily interested in the product they are interested in the outcomes so you should not be a barrier to things being delivered. Causeway shares that vision too. It differentiates Causeway and is another reason why I was fully behind the conjoining of the businesses.’
This central tenet of Yotta’s philosophy – only those platforms open to all data sources and applications will survive – is also a core part of the Causeway business model. And who can argue? From the greater use of internet of things networks - ‘not growing as fast as lots of people would like but they are growing in terms of use’ - to the use of ‘public-facing apps,’ you have to move with the times.
‘Where data comes from is changing all of the time and will continue to change. One of the really interesting things is the emergence of public-facing apps to report issues. Waze is interesting, but also companies like Fix My Street and councils which provide public-facing apps. The way data is acquired is changing significantly.’
However, it is not just the data that is changing, the market is becoming a more sophisticated consumer of data, with tier one contractors building their own dashboards to draw local analysis from data lakes. Does this represent a threat?
‘I think if you are talking about term maintenance processes whereby the contractor wants to get an overall view of efficiency and operational excellence across many aspects of their relationship with their customers – that is the future and Causeway will be a part of that we deal with the same companies. Because Alloy is so modern and was always built with the interchange of data in mind and also the acquisition of data there is no barrier to us playing a part. I don’t see control hubs as competition I just see that as another use of the systems and data that we can provide.’
Mr Smee argues that the real worry remains the fallacy that computers can end up making all the decisions for us. This becomes an even bigger issue as wider data rivers pour into these lakes and present options beyond the deterioration versus finance of asset management.
‘We work with customers right now in areas like accident data in relation to skid resistance and speed, to try and get correlations so we get maintenance spend in the right areas. So bringing different data sources together, including traffic counts and footfall counts – yes I think it’s advisable. But I don’t recommend a black box solution to any of this where computers make the decision. It is there to carry the weight and help people make decisions more speedily.’
Having come into the highways sector from outside and in just 13 years played a significant role in transforming it, you might imagine Mr Smee has earned at least a prolonged sojourn on his laurels if not a permanent rest. This does not appear to be part of his plans.
‘No finishing line has been crossed, no perfection or endpoint. This is just the latest change in a series of changes that has taken our company forward for the sake of the customers and the staff. There are many things left to do that are better served by us being inside Causeway. Our customers would not want to hear anything else.’
After all, there are always barbarians waiting at the gate and Rome was not built in a day or even 13 years.
