InEight Tightens Hold on Construction Project Management Software for Infrastructure
- Charles Rathmann
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Purpose-built tools, embedded analytics, growing AI capabilities, and harmonization of acquired functionality make InEight a solid platform for companies engaged in regulated, complex projects
Any product category will divide itself into subcategories over time. With Procore first in the general contractor market with well-adopted construction project management software-as-a-service (SaaS), and Autodesk Construction Cloud vying for second, marketing experts may tell a company like Scottsdale-based InEight to focus on a distinct segment of the market, meeting the needs of these companies better than the field.
And that is exactly what InEight has done, with a laser focus on the needs of contractors, construction managers, and owners involved in large, complex, regulated projects. I’d first encountered InEight during a past life in 2022 with the release of InEight Design, which brings to the application suite traceability required under alternative delivery projects like design build or engineer, procure, construct (EPC) to the application suite. I’d also delved into the deep analytics capabilities embedded in the application through Microsoft Power BI. Because InEight is built on the Microsoft Azure platform, Power BI comes bundled, and customers need no other license unless their needs are extreme or unusual.
Also baked in are AI capabilities to do things that humans are not efficient at, like task sequencing or automated duration suggestions for CPM schedules. This combines powerful proprietary AI with an analytics tool already intimately familiar to many managers.
But during a June 2026 briefing with InEight Chief Product Officer Brad Barth, we got an earful on broader AI functionality in the product, new capabilities for companies doing federal work, and a comprehensive look at how well-rationalized InEight’s acquisitions have been.
“Ten years ago, we started down this road,” Barth said. “AI was a thing, but it wasn't obviously the thing that it is now. We could see where it was going and felt all along that there was value from leveraging historical data. How can we leverage the work that all these folks, estimators, schedulers, planners, do on every project? There's got to be a way to use that to inform decisions and make the next project easier and everybody more efficient.”
Today, InEight boasts a bevy of AI features including:
Smart Planning to build and update schedules using historical data and company-specific knowledge libraries, with AI making suggestions based on the scope
The ability to automatically create submittal logs inside of the platform using AI to interrogate spec documents
InEight Intelligence, which allows users to ask complex questions across project documents, and get quick AI-generated summaries of documents without having to leave the platform
Later this year, InEight will add the ability to automatically extract issues from jobsite photos, and suggest responses for items including requests for information (RFIs) and submittals
InEight Acquisitions Rationalized and Extended
Acquisitions in enterprise software are common, and they can be done well or poorly. Starting by acquiring a technologically obsolete product never helps, and acquiring multiple, often competing, products can create confusion and problems for prospective and current customers. These products may receive basic integrations of select fields, or perhaps only interfaces or import capabilities, leaving them a unified product in name only. These “collectors” are sometimes engaged in simple private equity rollups of construction software for the recurring revenue stream, with varying levels of ongoing investment.
One example of well-rationalized acquisitions is Autodesk, and its Autodesk Construction Cloud, now rebranded under the Forma platform. The product was born of the Plangrid, Building Connected, Assemble Systems, Pype and ProEst acquisitions. Each of these were modern, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications chosen carefully for suitability and then harmonized into a unified product.
InEight has handled its acquisitions in measured fashion as well. This was not the result of a private equity roll-up. Kiewit Corporation standardized on the Hard Dollar estimating system in 2011, acquired the company entirely in 2013, and then rebranded its technology arm to create InEight.
“Each acquired product underwent a rebuilding process to align around common reporting and analytics, UI, and single sign-on with the platform — rather than just badging them under a common brand,” Barth said. "What we've done is acquired things to accelerate the delivery of this product strategy. With each acquisition, there was a two- or three-year span where we would essentially recreate them, not from the ground up, because we want to take advantage of all the goodness that's already there, but connect them into the platformand unify the user interfaces. So it is an integrated play, not a bunch of point systems with the same logo on them."
InEight Document, InEight Estimate, InEight Schedule, InEight Model and InEight Billings are built on acquired products, harmonized and embedded in the company’s cloud platform alongside internally developed functionality for:
Work planning
Quality/safety compliance
Contract management
Change order management
Completions/commissioning
Design management
Common reporting and dashboarding through Explore & Report, facilitated by an underlying unified data model for reporting and analytics
InEight also provides ~1,000 APIs to enable InEight data and functionality to participate in third-party developments, including integrations, reporting, and external AI initiatives.
FedRAMP and Construction Project Management Software
Since InEight is designed for contractors involved in significant, complex and mission-critical projects, it is not surprising the company pursued and secured FEDramp moderate equivalency status in the course of 2025. FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) is required for cloud services including software, platforms, or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that creates, collects, processes, stores, or maintains federal government data on behalf of a federal agency. Various other construction software vendors have achieved varying degrees of FedRAMP certification including:
Bentley Systems ProjectWise and OpenGround
Who is a Fit for InEight?
InEight’s origins and product direction are focused on the needs of stakeholders engaged in projects in heavy civil, energy, oil and gas, mining, wastewater, and other infrastructure. But in part because the application suite is used extensively by major generals with footprints in multiple disciplines, Barth says usage is picking up in vertical building projects, and the product is evolving to meet these usage patterns.
“Some of these largest firms do everything,” Barth said. “They'll do vertical building, they'll do infrastructure, so they want to use one system. We've really evolved the platform a lot to kind of encompass all those verticals, and I'd say the only one we don't get into really at all is residential home building, but we are still involved in some multifamily. Some of our clients build massive condominium towers.”
How large does a company have to be for InEight to become a viable choice? That is a trickier question to answer, in part because of the modular nature of the product.
“For example, our estimating system, which has been continually evolving for 30 years, we have customers that use it to do $1 million projects,” Barth, who came to InEight through the acquisition of Hard Dollar, said. “We get our start at a new account with usually one of three products, it's usually either Estimate or Document, because everybody needs a way to store and control documentation, and then lately it's Schedule.”
In some cases, this “land and expand” approach is a long-term strategy. One customer, according to Barth, signed with Hard Dollar in 1996 for $50,000, but recently signed a multi-million deal for the full InEight suite.
BOTTOM LINE: Trying to use the same construction SaaS product for a strip mall interior buildout as the Chunnel makes no sense. And companies involved in more demanding, mission-critical projects of various sizes should become familiar with different modules in the InEight suite. For projects with longer timelines, design-build, and requirements for earned value management (EVM), critical path scheduling, and quantitative risk analysis, should have InEight towards the top of the list—particularly larger firms that will find appealing the standard pricing that does not automatically grow with their revenue.
Comments