Bentley’s 2009 “Be Inspired” Event

Earlier this month, I attended Bentley’s "Be Inspired" event that was held in Charlotte, North Carolina, from Oct 12 to 14. This event was planned in lieu of Bentley's annual BE user conference, which is being held “virtually” this year on account of the dismal economic climate that has restricted travel for most AEC professionals. In contrast to the user conference which typically draws over 2000 attendees (see the report on the 2008 Bentley BE Conference), attendance to the Be Inspired event was by invitation only, and it was therefore much smaller, with about 300 attendees. However, it was packed with as much substance as the annual user conferences, with updates from Bentley executives about the company’s recent acquisitions and upcoming technologies, the most key one being the "i-model" intended to facilitate dynamic collaboration. The bulk of the event was devoted to Bentley's annual BE Awards, and what made it especially interesting this year was that the finalists from the various categories were at hand to give a first-hand presentation of their respective projects, providing the opportunity to get a better understanding of how Bentley solutions were being used in its top-rated projects from all over the world. These “best practices” presentations were held in parallel for all the varied infrastructure industries Bentley solutions cater to. This issue of the AECbytes Newsletter discusses the key business and product-related updates from the executive presentations at the event, while the highlights of the “best practices” presentations from the "Buildings and Structural” track will be covered in a separate article next week.

Business-Related Updates

2009 marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Bentley Systems, and is therefore a year of special significance for it. Bentley CEO Greg Bentley shared a letter written to the company by Pennsylvania Governor, Edward G. Rendell, congratulating Bentley Systems and its five founding brothers on the milestone. It is indeed no mean achievement that a private company has not only survived but continued to grow steadily despite the presence of large competitors such as Autodesk and Intergraph in buildings and other infrastructure industries. Bentley’s revenue in 2008 continued its upward trend despite the economic downturn and crossed the $500 million milestone, with a growing proportion of it coming directly from owner/operators. The company has spent over $1 billion on acquisitions and R&D since 1995. It now has 2700 employees around the world, of which 58 hold doctoral degrees and 564 hold masters-level degrees. Also, according to Bentley, its relative market share in AEC has actually grown from 2008 to 2009 compared to Autodesk’s AEC division, based on comparison of revenue from the first half of 2008 ($250 M for Bentley, $325 M for Autodesk) to the first half of 2009 ($250 M for Bentley, $300 M for Autodesk).

In short, those concerned with the stability and long-term viability of the company should be able to lay their doubts to rest. Bentley seems to be in sound financial health with good long-term prospects. It announced a number of acquisitions at the Be Inspired event, including 9SQ Corporation, a leading provider of integration services and plant design software called PlantWAVE based in South Korea; Bridgemaster, the leading software in China for the fast and efficient automated production of bridge construction drawings; and gINT Software, a leading provider of geotechnical and geo-environmental products including gINT Enterprise for lifecycle interoperability of subsurface data, headquartered in Santa Rosa, California. In addition, Bentley has entered into a technology agreement with Pointools Ltd., which develops the Vortex software for managing point cloud data captured by 3D laser scanning of infrastructure assets, including aerial LiDAR surveys. The Vortex engine will be incorporated into MicroStation and all of Bentley’s different disciplinary products that are built on it (including its BIM applications), allowing them to be better equipped to work with point cloud models of existing structures, which are becoming increasingly common in all the infrastructure disciplines including buildings (see Figure 1).

Bentley CTO Keith Bentley, in his presentation, reiterated Bentley’s position that workflows in all the infrastructure disciplines are federated, and emphasized the benefits of Bentley’s layered approach to software development, shown in Figure 2. These benefits include being able to leverage the improvements in its platform products, MicroStation and ProjectWise, across all disciplines; maintaining consistency of user experience, data formats, etc., across all the applications; and providing continuous improvement in their products as opposed to drastic changes. According to him, Bentley is very committed to long-term relationships with its customers, and is continually communicating with them and soliciting their feedback and inputs through its BE Communities forums. While most software vendors spend 80% of their effort in securing new customers and the remaining 20% in focusing on their existing customers, Bentley operates in the reverse way. Another key point Bentley sought to emphasize is its philosophy that “software is a service” as opposed to the common “software as a service” (Saas) approach. To this end, in addition to software development, it includes a large Professional Services group, the Bentley Institute that provides both live training and online learning courses, the Bentley LEARN program that provides unlimited on-demand eLearning for a fixed annual fee, a BE Careers network, and other professional and networking services.

Bentley also used the Be Inspired event to announce two new subscription enhancements intended to respond to the current widespread economic downturn. The first is “Country-Level License Pooling” which benefits firms that have multiple offices within an individual country. It enables project teams to share Bentley software and resources across all such offices, enabling more efficient asset management and more flexible allocation of project work to team members across multiple offices to maximize workforce utilization. The second announcement is the introduction of new “Passport Subscriptions” which provides individual practitioners with an affordable alternative to the perpetual license purchases. For a fixed annual fee that is a fraction of the cost of a traditional license, a discipline-specific Passport Subscription provides access to the full range of software, training, and support that a practitioner’s project typically requires. For example, the Passport Subscription for a mechanical engineer for building design covers 8 applications and costs $4,295 per year as opposed to their perpetual license cost of $20,421. With this new subscription type, Bentley hopes to attract new users who were previously unable to afford its solutions due to the high upfront cost. The affordable subscription option should also help to attract users who would like to try out Bentley solutions without the fear of being locked down to them.

In addition to the business announcements and technology updates (which are covered in the following section), the executive presentations also included a special section entitled “Nostalgia” to mark the 25th anniversary of the company. It was enjoyable as well as fascinating, as it provided a glimpse into the early days of the company—complete with team photos and product screenshots—and traced its growth from its start with 2 employees in 1984 and first version named PseudoStation released in 1985, to its enormous range of solutions today that are used in leading projects around the world. A snapshot of these is presented in Figure 3, while Figure 4 shows a comparison of an early version of MicroStation (Version 4 on the PC, released in 1990) with the latest version available today. Even the earlier version looks relatively sophisticated for its times, with the ability to model in 3D and display 3D views.

Technology Updates: Bentley’s New “i-model” and Dynamic Collaboration

The most significant technology announcement that Bentley made at the Be Inspired event was the launch of a new concept called the “i-model” which it defined as a “container for open infrastructure information exchange” (see Figure 5). A key characteristic of an i-model is provenance, that is, knowledge of its origin and evolution, or in other words, its change management history. i-models are also optimized for high-performance visualization. Other key features of i-models include the ability to contain 2D/3D multi-disciplinary geometry and business data; self describing capability, so that they require no source application features to display or describe the information they contain with full fidelity; full re-usability, enabling teams to reference, repurpose, or republish the content to make it accessible to a wider audience; the inclusion of industrial-strength digital rights management, with digital signatures to validate and verify an i-model’s status; high engineering precision for dependable material estimation; and the ability to store information using multiple industry standards including CIS/2, IFC, and ISO 15926. i-models can be directly created from Bentley solutions. In addition, a free plug-in for Revit is available to create i-models from it. There is also an i-model Composer application available through ProjectWise, Bentley’s collaboration platform, for creating i-models from other applications.

One of the immediate uses of the i-model is to facilitate dynamic collaboration in the new version of Project Navigator V8i (SELECT series 1), which is being released this month. Recall from my article on Bentley’s V8i launch last November that this was a new application developed in-house for visual collaboration, review, and analysis, and included capabilities for clash detection, walking through the model, and measuring and querying objects. In addition to viewing and analyzing project information, the new version of Project Navigator also allows the information to be augmented by project teams. According to Bentley, current interoperability solutions only allow static visualization, with no means to capture and build on value-adding feedback, such as that which occurs between a structural engineer and an architect, for example. Static visualization in collaboration—such as the kind available in leading competitor, NavisWorks—only helps to detect and document problems; it does not help in resolution and optimization. In contrast, the use of the i-model can make the collaboration process more dynamic, allowing information flow in both directions and enabling any participant to add value by providing feedback that can be captured and preserved (see Figure 6).

In addition to better leveraging the interactive nature of information stored inside i-models, the new version of Project Navigator also offers versatile viewing capabilities and a more intuitive user experience (see Figure 7). When used in conjunction with ProjectWise collaboration servers, there are additional benefits such as the ability to issue notifications so that subscribing team members are always kept aware of subsequent changes to their work, and the ability to automate all publishing and transformation steps for larger projects, according to schedule (at a given time) or by event (upon file check-in).

In addition to its use to facilitate dynamic review in ProjectWise Navigator, Bentley gave some other examples of the potential use of i-models, including consolidation of multiple files in different formats from different vendors to facilitate integrated structural modeling (see Figure 8) and composing i-models for construction to work with applications such as ConstructSIM that it acquired last year. Bentley is also envisioning many more use cases of i-models, optimized for various tasks such as energy analysis, material estimating, data handover, and so on, as shown in Figure 9.

Overall, while the concept of an i-model is certainly intriguing, I found that it was also somewhat abstract, particularly since many of these use cases have still to be implemented. It also begs the question of whether something new is needed in the AEC industry when we already have plenty of existing standards for capturing 3D information such as IFC, PDF, DWF, and so on. According to Bentley, what all these standards lack is “provenance” which makes them unable to capture project design history—and this was the rationale behind the development of the i-model. It is not trying to compete with existing standards, but is instead meant to complement their use and become a robust container for all types of files. We will have to wait to see actual examples of the i-model in use solving real-world problems before we can judge how helpful and effective it actually is, and whether it is indeed the breakthrough technology that Bentley envisions it to be.

Conclusion

For its existing and potential new users in the AEC industry, Bentley’s “Be Inspired” event should come as a welcome reminder that the company is not just stable and surviving, but actually still thriving, despite the tough economic climate for technology companies as well as AEC firms. The recent acquisitions add to its already extensive portfolio of products and services; of these, however, only the Pointools agreement is directly relevant for the Buildings sector. Bentley’s growing reach into other infrastructure disciplines is highly admirable and adds to the company’s overall strength and bottom line; at the same time, it does lead to the question of whether this translates to a diminished focus on Building solutions. At the current time, Bentley lists 13 infrastructure disciplines that it provides solutions for, of which only two fall in the domain of traditional AEC firms: Buildings and Campuses. Thus, the question of diminished focus is a legitimate concern. However, given that all of Bentley’s BIM solutions are based on the common platform of MicroStation and ProjectWise, they naturally benefit from the continuing improvements being made to the platform products. Were this not the case, fears of the Building segment getting sidelined could not be so easily allayed. And, of course, Bentley’s increasing success in other disciplines helps to ensure the long-term viability of the company, which is also a critical factor when making technology implementation decisions.

Stay tuned for the highlights of selected AEC projects implemented using Bentley’s BIM solutions which will be published next week.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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