WE BELIEVE
AVAIL is fortunate to have inherited a deep history in the AEC market; we knew many key leaders, technologists, and even the competition before they were the competition. We find the industry to be very caring, smart, and highly connected. We prefer to work in conjunction with other technology firms, or to borrow a term, we prefer healthy coopetition. We believe if you want to know where someone stands you need to know what they believe and that belief provides the proper context to make comparisons.
the driving principle
The driving principle for AVAIL is the belief that information should be connected and when possible delivered to the user. The internet introduced the information age but it has always required the user to find (and ultimately retrieve and “re-store”) relevant information to complete their mission. We call the opportunity to automatically bring this information to the user rather than them having to go to it an “inversion of the web”. This allows content to be connected and served to users based on the context in which they are working, driven by specific workflows or related information. To fulfill this mission we’ve developed four pillars; design, collaboration, extensibility, and insights, that all relate back to the simple notion of connected data and information.
Business – How we Conduct Ourselves
We believe if you make a great product it largely speaks for itself and our customers will tell others. We spend most of our time and resources developing AVAIL, not on marketing.
We believe that in order to make great products you have to be intimately familiar with your customers and their problems. We spend many hours each day talking to our customers and they have direct access to the management team. That’s how we learn.
We believe our long term success rests on building long term relationships with our customers so we talk often and openly in order to secure and hold that trust.
We believe that in order to solve the big problems we have to focus on identifying and chipping away at the root causes. That takes time and thus customers who believe in the mission.
The BIG Problems
We believe professionals in the AEC industry have a huge challenge in getting the information they need to complete their work from hundreds, if not thousands, of sources. We developed AVAIL to begin bringing those resources directly to them.
We believe the volume of information AEC professionals must access on a daily basis calls for new ways to search and retrieve that information outside traditional file folders. The old methods are dead.
We believe hierarchical file folders as a means of organizing and retrieving files have reached the end of their usefulness so we developed AVAIL to provide a robust new search and browsing experience for AEC professionals.
We believe the increase in cloud storage locations is making it even more difficult to locate the information you need.
We believe content management solutions generally fail because they require someone to maintain them. Over time this model breaks and the users of the system lose trust in the content. So we designed AVAIL Stream to automatically publish content using a rules-based publishing paradigm triggered when files hit the file system. Publishing in AVAIL is a byproduct of creating a file.
Design – Visual interface to easily find and use content
We believe professionals in the AEC industry need to see information. Seeing the information speeds the sorting and browsing process, so we’ve developed AVAIL to satisfy those needs with a beautifully simple interface that focuses on seeing previews of files and content.
We believe design professionals deserve better software so we’ve agonized over the design of AVAIL to provide them with a beautifully simple solution to accessing the information they need on a daily basis.
We believe when it comes to user experience and interface design that less is more. AVAIL perfectly illustrates the software paradox of “the simpler the front end, the more complex the back end”.
We believe AEC professionals are plagued by errors and omissions related to legacy content storage and management solutions, namely traditional file systems. AVAIL saves AEC professionals time and reduces errors in their work by introducing robust search, retrieval and workflow tools.
context – Ability to adapt to your thought patterns
We believe Context is vitally important to solving the challenges of content retrieval so we’ve developed an approach we refer to as Progressive Search that melds contextual information with search results to help our customers manage the deluge of content.
We believe context is important when it comes to locating files and information so we’ve developed AVAIL to allow users to find the same thing in multiple ways, matching the context of their content journey.
We believe collaboration is essential among design and engineering professionals in the AEC industry and much of that collaboration is around the information and “content” they create, store in various software application files, and share with colleagues; so we have built a set of features that ties information to content (providing context) and improves asynchronous communication among project teams.
How often have you saved a file and six months later can’t find it? When you do finally find it you ask yourself why you saved it there. It must have made sense when you saved it or was the “least bad” place to save it. The answer is that the context changed. This is a huge limitation of traditional file systems. They are one-dimensional and content can only live in one context.
Extensibility – Future proof architecture that accommodates all content
We believe information is finding its way into more and more locations so we are developing AVAIL Connectors to connect AVAIL to the AEC industry’s most used resources.
We believe AEC professionals need a broad content management solution that satisfies the diverse needs of many software applications and workflows rather than having multiple “vertical” solutions that become inefficient and expensive to maintain. AVAIL provides a “horizontal” alternative to point solutions that are designed to only solve a narrow content management problem.
We believe content should be “close at hand” in heavily used applications like Revit, Rhino, AutoCAD, Civil3D, 3ds Max, and SketchUp; so we developed AVAIL Browsers for those applications that provide direct access to content within those applications.
We believe it’s impossible for us to do everything (or to be the best at everything) so we’ve created an extensible platform and begun exposing APIs to AVAIL that allows customers, 3rd party application developers, and partners to integrate their applications with AVAIL.
We believe a large part of our customers’ value is captured in their unique workflows, so we designed AVAIL around a core set of features that can be tailored to each of their practices.
We believe the best content and user experiences mandate desktop software and can’t be accomplished in a web browser so we’ve developed AVAIL Desktop and AVAIL Browsers for the most popular applications in the AEC industry.
Insight – Analytics to understand usage, control quality and gain insights into curating content
We believe analytics information on what content is being searched for and used is the key to effectively knowing what content to build and maintain. So we built analytics into the core of the AVAIL product.
We believe customers should have free access to the analytics data they generate so we designed AVAIL to provide access to the source analytics data and put it in their control.
We believe AVAIL Analytics can provide a “content roadmap” so BIM Managers can focus their efforts on the content needed most by their team and not try to “eat an elephant” when it comes to trying to manage an overwhelming body of content in need of attention.
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We hope this provides you with a little more insight into why and how we do what we do. As we stated above, we believe you deserve better software solutions. We’re driven to provide that in AVAIL.
Randall Stevens
Founder & CEO
