Civico’s new Landscape page answers a plain question: for each job in the life of a building or infrastructure asset, who already sells software for it, and who is attacking it from Asia? This note covers what the incumbent side shows. The startup side is a first pass and we flag exactly where it is thin.
What we mapped
- Incumbents: 1,484 separately named products from 26 global vendors, including Autodesk, Bentley Systems, AVEVA, Nemetschek, Trimble, Hexagon, Procore, Oracle, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Honeywell, Johnson Controls and Esri. Each product links to a vendor page.
- Taxonomy: 79 capabilities in six lifecycle steps (plan, design, procure, build, operate, renew) plus a cross-cutting group.
- Asian startups: 32 companies so far, from the Civico deals database and homepage-verified research. Funding is shown only where a source states it.
What we noticed
1. The weight is in operations. 538 of the 1,484 products (36%) sit in the operate step, against 315 in design, 236 in build, 135 in plan and 82 in procure. Operations is where industrial and building-systems vendors such as AVEVA, Siemens, Honeywell and Johnson Controls compete, and it counts hardware and control systems as products.
2. The renew end of the lifecycle is close to empty. Only 7 products map to the four renew capabilities: retrofit, condition assessment, decommissioning and circularity. Decommissioning and circular-materials tooling had no mapped product from any of the 26 vendors. Retrofit had only Oracle’s Opower energy-efficiency programmes. This is the clearest incumbent gap in the data, and it fits the retrofit and embodied-carbon agenda in Asia’s older city stock. Whether startups are filling it is the question the next search pass will answer.
3. A few capabilities rest on one vendor. Geotechnical and subsurface modelling has 21 mapped products, and 96% of them are Bentley Systems’ (through its Seequent line). Machine control for earthworks is held by two vendors, Hexagon and Trimble. Permit and regulatory submission has just two mapped products, from Glodon and Trimble, even as governments across Asia roll out their own permit portals (see the Core tier adoption evidence).
4. AI claims are still a minority of product pages. 229 of 1,484 products (15%) have vendor pages that market AI, machine learning or generative features. The share is highest in cross-cutting tools (28%) and lowest in build (11%) and design (12%). Bentley Systems accounts for 50 of the 229. A blank flag means we did not see the claim on the page we read, not that the product has no AI.
What the data cannot yet tell us
- Startups. We searched for Asian startups across the taxonomy, but the web-search allowance ran out before most capabilities were covered. A capability that looks like white space may only be unsearched. The Landscape page says this on every view, and the next run will report which capabilities were searched.
- Vendor under-count. Some vendor sites block automated reading. Autodesk and Hexagon pages in particular were read from product lists and search results, so their counts are a floor.
- Mapping is judgement. A product maps to one primary capability even when it spans several. Generic CAD platforms came out as zero because their tools were mapped to specific disciplines.
What this means for teams scouting the region
→ Treat renew (retrofit, decommissioning, circularity) as the first place to look for gaps in incumbent tooling, then check for Asian startups before calling it open. → In concentrated capabilities, such as subsurface modelling, ask whether a single-vendor dependency is a risk for your project or an entry point for a partner. → When a vendor says “AI”, ask for the product page: 85% of the products we mapped do not market it.
Method note
Everything on the Landscape page can be recomputed from three files: taxonomy.csv, products.csv and startups.csv. The classification rules are on the Method page.