Tuesday, May 1. 2007

Bentley Geospatial "Press Conference"

It was an informal conference with all the press and a large group from the geospatial team. Here are some of the questions. Questions and answers are parphrased.

Q: Will Bentley support open source?
A: Not at this time. We think users want a company that gets paid for its products. We will support integration with open source.

Q: With geocoordination (core support for projection on the fly) will there be support for OGC Coordinate Transformation Service?
A: We are looking at it.

Q: What are geospatial 3rd party partners doing?
A: Their value add role is different; they are localizing software in the sense of making it work for local workflows/data models. They are not creating "new apps" per se.

Q: What happened to MicroStation Geographics?
A: It dates back to 1995. It was toolkit, not an end-user product and had limited possibilities for users. In 2004 we began to revampthe vision with two products – Bentley Map aimed as an end-user productivity tool and the MicroStation Geospatial Extension geared more to create a platform for customization. (These are expected later this year.)

Q: Will Bentley do more GIS analysis in its products?
A: The analysis is built into the vertical apps.

[Disclosure: Bentley covered travel, hotel and meals.]

Comments

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"We think users want a company that gets paid for its products."

Users don't generally care what business model companies use, as long as it's sustainable and they produce and support decent software. Enough of the FUD that an open source development model isn't commercially viable.

In general, companies that try to "compete" using non-differentiating proprietary software need to re-evaluate whether it is worth wasting their efforts on projects that will go the way of O'Reilly WebSite Professional.

"We will support integration with open source."

I would really be interested in seeing Bentley engage the open source community on these integration points. In particular, supporting the development of data access layers in OGR and FDO for Bentley formats (V8 DGN?) would be great!

Jason

#1 Jason Birch (Link) on 2007-05-01 21:52 (Reply)

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