Update: Videos of these presentations are now available online here.
The Bentley Be Together event kicked off today in Philadelphia. Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems, provided a keynote address that highlighted the company’s 2010 Annual Report. The company saw a bit of a decline last year, mirroring the 12% decline that occurred in the largest engineering firms (according to ENR). Despite the global economic decline, the company had near-record acquisitions.
The company sees a future full of opportunities given aging infrastructure, and the economic value of intelligent infrastructure. Bentley put the challenges in the context of global challenges, including the threat of earthquakes and the importance of structural analysis, water sustainability, energy provision and supply, transportation and shelter.
Bentley has been working strongly on dynamic collaboration with ProjectWise and the Bentley Navigator. Navigator offers dynamic collaboration that allow the control and management of comments and suggestions, with construction simulation and project timeline analysis. The tools allow for greater control and analysis of plans for the greatest construction efficiency.
The value of subscriptions were a highlight, with significant cost savings for the entire suite of tools, and the advantage of online and interactive training.
Bhupinder Singh, the senior vice president of Bentley Software, discussed the technology investments that the company is making. The V8i SELECT series of releases is designed for low disruption and high innovation with better information modeling. The software addresses better coordination during design and construction, earlier identification of conflicts and lower costs with better infrastructure performance.
Singh emphasized Bentley’s strength with a single re-usable platform, a federated data approach, and collaborative workflows. The platform evolution and strategy has been to share underlying technologies, and to reduce the number of different file format. The federated data approach centers on ProjectWise, where data across distributed workgroups can be managed centrally. The new concept of i-models that combine drawings, data, models and input from multiple disciplines into a shareable package for better project collaboration.
The company is focusing on more realistic renderings with their Luxology engine. A big part of this greater realism is the integration of point clouds with the PointTools engine. Point clouds are being integrated into all different packages for plant, design, geospatial, etc. But, Bentley’s take on BIM is to facilitate seamless 2D to 3D interactions, rather than separate 2D and 3D workflows.
I’ll be exploring 3D visualization and geospatial advancements in further posts.
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Thanks for these reports.I was unable to attend this year and was glad to find your reports. This is knowledge Transfer at its best.
thanks