December 2002 saw two milestones for a key player in the project collaboration sector: the total number of users of the BIW Information Channel service passed the 20,000 mark and BIW now hosts information relating to over 1,000 projects. At 29th December, the total number of registered users had reached 20,648, from 2493 different companies. The total number of projects was 1015, with a total capital value conservatively estimated at around £9 billion. Over 297,000 drawings have been published on the system to date, along with 161,000 other documents.

BIW chief executive Colin Smith says: "Industry surveys indicate that collaboration technology is fast becoming the norm rather than the exception for all significant construction projects, and our latest statistics confirm this trend. We passed the 10,000 mark in November 2001and just over twelve months later, our user-base has more than doubled and is now growing at a rate of some 900 new users every month.

At one time, prospective clients were reluctant to select a system just in case the provider's hosting infrastructure proved incapable of supporting their projects. We are attracting a growing number of clients who recognise that we offer a highly reliable, robust, secure and scalable service. Tens of thousands of industry professionals use our system every week; we now average over 110,000 user sessions every month."