Bentley Systems #BeInspired 2010 Event Opens with Congratulations to “Resilient” Users of Infrastructure Solutions

The economic climate from 2008 through mid-2010 has been challenging to some sectors of the world where infrastructure projects were put on hold. This is reflected in the success of those companies providing engineering and design software like Autodesk who sustained a decline and stock price (the company has since recovered nicely) and the Bentley Systems whose revenue declined in 2009 to levels seen in 2007, or about $50 Million. Greg Bentley, in his opening presentation at the BeInspired conference, said however that he believes that 2010 will show a rebound in his revenue run rate. Currently, Bentley shows a revenue balance of 61% international users versus 39% in the United States.

Bentley also showed a number of metrics to demonstrate the number of hours in which MicroStation was in use. MicroStation utilization hours measured approximately 23 hours per week per license (see example image from Asia at right). As such, though the global economy may be weak, productivity was decidedly increasing. On the investment front, Bentley made a major investment in SITEOPS , engineering software for site design which the company says is a glimpse into the future of SaaS for civil modeling.

Bhupinder Singh, Bentley’s senior vice president for software, discussed a number of initiatives for the company during the past year that resulted in product improvements including:

• Bentley update service – a web service that will give you notification when updates are available. Users can even set up filters whereby they will be notified on the subset of products in which they are interested to receive updates.
• Luxology is now embedded completely into MicroStation for civil visualization, an announcement that was made last May.
• Point Clouds are now a native data type inside of Bentley products
• In SELECTseries 3, to be released in 2011, users will be able to detect clashes between geometry and point cloud data.
• Integrated Structural Modeling (ISM) is a model synchronization solution that provides federation, consensus modeling and collaboration services. ISM was released one year ago and Singh said he as seen in increase in its use by engineering firms.
• Multidiscipline optimization (MDO) is a solution for determining cost benefit of alternative solutions for design structural designs versus the applications under consideration from multiple disciplines such as design, construction, energy analysis, etc. This methodology is used to help balance cost when weighing multiple design options. MDO is a non-deterministic methodology whereby there may be more than one answer to a given problem.

In general, Bentley is trying to layout a framework for instituting business intelligence (BI) for the engineering community that they call “information modeling.” Whereby the enterprise geospatial community may think in terms of integrating location technology into enterprise BI solutions, Bentley’s focus on design engineering translates that concept into deriving information by visualizing design improvements and reaping better return on assets (ROA). They seem to be more in tune with performance metrics rather than qualitative assessment for utilizing technology to help their clients demonstrate this ROA.

The BeInspired 2010 conference is an annual event for Bentley’s most innovative clients and awards are issued to selected nominees from those who have submitted entrees. In addition, over 60 members of the press are here for this event. I am serving as a juror for the "Visualization and Project Collaboration" category.

[Full disclosure: Bentley is supporting this trip with travel expenses]