CMiC has announced partnerships with Textura, which offers an construction payment management application, and Vico Software, which makes BIM and virtual construction software.

Gregory Devine, communications coordinator for CMiC, said the Vico partnership came about in large part because customers approached the company and expressed interest in being able to integrate BIM data into CMiC's construction project lifecycle management system. (BIM stands for Building Information Modeling.) CMiC wasn't about to build its own BIM system, so it approached Vico.

The end result of the CMiC-Vico Software partnership is an adaptor that will bring BIM data from Vico into CMiC in a data model such as a spreadsheet or XML file. The advantage here is that information about building materials, quantities and costs won't have to be re-entered into a construction schedule, Devine said.

Vico, for its part, already counts CAD and BIM software vendors Autodesk, Graphisoft Tekla and Trimble among its partners. If, for example, a user designs a concrete structure using Tekla, that document can be published to the Vico Office environment, which will perform a quantity takeoff to develop an estimate and schedule for each element in the model.

"The last thing we want to do is create a model for model's sake," noted Holly Allison, Vico's vice president of marketing. "We need to take this information that's so relevant and bring it to the general contractor."

The CMiC-Textura partnership, meanwhile, came about because the companies kept running into customers who used both vendors' applications and wanted greater integration between them.

An XML-based interface will embed Textura data into CMiC. For example, once a general contractor approves a subcontractor's invoice using Textura, that invoice will get uploaded into the CMiC accounting system, said Bill Eichhorn, co-founder and president of Textura. Change order and payment information is also synchronized between the two systems.