New ProjectWise and AssetWise Innovations Empower High-Performing Project Teams and Asset Operations

AMSTERDAM — (BUSINESS WIRE) — October 20, 2010 — Be Inspired: Thought Leadership in Infrastructure -- Yesterday morning, before a select audience of senior infrastructure professionals from leading architectural, engineering, construction, and owner-operator organizations, Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley and SVP Bhupinder Singh presented the company’s progress and plans for leveraging information modeling, both for increasingly integrated projects, and for operations of high-performing, intelligent infrastructure assets. Bentley Systems is the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for the infrastructure that sustains our world. The infrastructure executives in attendance gathered from 35 countries to participate in Bentley’s Be Inspired: Thought Leadership in Infrastructure event being held this week in Amsterdam. Following the morning keynotes, the 400 executives at this invitation-only event attended thought leadership presentations by finalists in the 2010 Be Inspired Awards program – choosing from among the more than 50 given throughout the remainder of the day.

The morning conference keynotes offered insights on innovations driving the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of software for infrastructure design, construction, and operations. Included were highlights of the V8i (SELECTseries 3) release of Bentley’s industry-leading project team collaboration platform, ProjectWise, and its newly announced AssetWise platform for infrastructure asset operations information modeling. Each innovation presented was underscored by examples from among the extraordinary projects of Be Inspired Awards nominees.

“Our commitment to leveraging information modeling across the infrastructure lifecycle empowers architects, engineers, and constructors to deliver integrated projects to owners,” said Greg Bentley. “And information modeling enables owners to operate intelligent infrastructure assets, which are safer, cleaner, and more efficient, for superior returns on investment.”

He emphasized that returns to owners and their constituents during infrastructure asset lifecycles are the ultimate benchmark for infrastructure professionals. He then described Bentley Systems’ plans to further extend its well-received approach to information modeling and dynamic collaboration in design and construction projects, towards dynamic handover – fully exploiting owners’ investments in information modeling for improved asset performance.

“We continue to progress towards the goals of our AssetWise initiative, which was first announced last February,” said Bentley. “We are increasingly enabling owners to benefit from intelligent and continuous handover from their project teams, and thus to leverage information modeling throughout the operations lifecycle. Uniquely, our AssetWise platform will manage AEC deliverables as structured data so that all dependencies are maintained and understood, assuring information integrity and operational compliance. Unlike ‘asset management’ systems limited to unstructured documents and their associated metadata, AssetWise comprehends the network of information relationships connecting the engineered and as-built asset to the operational asset. Through the combined and shared services of ProjectWise and AssetWise, information modeling can finally reach its potential for higher-performing, intelligent infrastructure.”

In the course of his keynote, Greg Bentley reported on:

• resilience in the company’s business during 2010 sufficient to achieve sequential and year-over-year organic growth, an expected return to record GAAP revenue runrate, and continued market-share gains;
• notable and diverse new opportunities for Bentley across the infrastructure lifecycle, including:
  • Among engineering applications, the company’s newly released OpenPlant Modeler V8i offering, the first to fulfill iRING international standards requirements, is garnering a great deal of market interest – and evaluation downloads – from users of UNIX-legacy competitors.
  • In construction, information modeling is being embraced at an unprecedented pace, with leading firms, especially for design-build, increasingly adopting Bentley’s Navigator V8i, and then ProjectWise V8i, for dynamic collaboration.
  • Among infrastructure owners, major municipalities are expressing strong interest in Bentley’s distinctively comprehensive 3D City solution, with record attendance at the company’s ongoing 3D City eSeminars, and with this subject attracting the highest registration of any roundtable at Be Inspired. Characteristically, Bentley’s 3D City solution goes beyond location and visualization, to support and simulate infrastructure performance.
• the inaugural release of the Bentley Infrastructure 500 Top Owners ranking, a unique global compendium of the largest public- and private-sector owners, in 46 countries, with infrastructure value representing cumulative net investment of over $13 trillion – available at www.bentley.com/500;
• the growing breadth of Bentley Passport Subscriptions, to enable individual infrastructure practitioners to affordably advance to an information-modeling level of practice by combining annual named-user licenses for multiple pertinent Bentley applications with Bentley LEARN subscriptions and applicable catalog content; the recent availability of the Civil Engineer for Wastewater Collection Passport Subscription brings the number of professional roles supported to 23;
• Bentley’s entry into the market for geotechnical engineering tools, by way of the forthcoming Civil Engineer for Geotechnical Analysis Passport Subscription, uniquely comprising the full spectrum of 18 established software modules developed in Europe by FINE Software for geotechnical requirements (from settlement and stability analyses to sheeting and foundation design), and the Civil Engineering for Advanced Geotechnical Analysis Passport Subscription, which adds specialized modules for finite-element modeling, ground loss, and tunneling. Bentley subscribers who have previewed the FINE Software modules, including their localization for American requirements, are enthusiastic about their comprehensive scope and superior quality by comparison to their existing assorted tools from fragmented suppliers. In conjunction with Bentley’s market-leading gINT geotechnical data management products, the new offerings mean Bentley Systems can now enable the under-served geotechnical engineering profession to finally take advantage of both technical and commercial software integration;
• the continuous expansion of Bentley’s online software services, from:
  • ProjectWise ONLINE, and
  • Exor Managed Services, to
  • the company’s public-private partnership for New Jersey DOT’s oversize/overweight vehicle permitting, to
  • Be Communities networking,
  • the Bentley Institute’s live training via virtual classrooms through Bentley’s LEARN Server, and
  • the Be Careers Network’s new STUDENTserver, to
  • the upcoming launch of a new website for Bentley iWare – software available from Bentley at no cost to promote interoperability and information reuse; examples to date include Bentley View, Structural Synchronizer V8 i, Structural Dashboard V8 i, i-model plug-ins for Revit, and, coming soon, a new i-model Previewer for Microsoft Outlook.
• Bentley’s investment to become the largest shareholder in BLUERIDGE Analytics, whose breakthrough SITEOPS site design optimization technology is delivered through cloud computing. A research project has been initiated to incorporate Bentley’s industry-leading hydrology and hydraulic modeling within the SITEOPS service, for yet more sophisticated drainage optimization.