Bentley's Year In Infrastructure 2013 Conference

Towards the end of October, I attended Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure 2013 conference that was held in London. In previous years, this has been known as the “Be Inspired” conference and is typically a small invitation-only event unlike Bentley’s user conference, Be Together, which is held in the US around May every year. The last “Be Inspired” conference was held in Amsterdam, and AECbytes provided a two-part look at the event, one with the key business and technology updates shared by Bentley executives, followed by a dedicated look at all the finalists’ presentations in the building-related categories of the Be Inspired awards, including the winning projects. A similar two-part strategy has been adopted for this year’s conference, with the main AEC-related updates from Bentley discussed in one article, and the project presentations published in a separate article.

The main updates from Bentley discussed in the first article on the conference included the official launch of its cloud software service called Bentley CONNECT, updates to its suite of mobile solutions including the introduction of its Field Supervisor app, and new and upcoming features in MicroStation, ProjectWise, and AECOsim Building Designer. The article also provides an overview of some other sessions at the conference, including a fascinating look at the London 2012 Olympics, the planning that went into the design of the infrastructure for it and how the execution was accomplished.

The second article looks at the projects that were selected as the finalists in the building-related categories of Bentley’s annual Be Inspired awards, the winners of which were announced at the conference.

Be sure to also check out the AECbytes research report published last month that compares the two leading applications, Bentley’s ProjectWise and Autodesk’s Vault, for data management and collaboration in AEC.

Lachmi Khemlani, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor, AECbytes

November 2013