Bentley #YII2016 recap: still independent, focused on making AEC sing
Bentley Systems’ annual Year In Infrastructure (YII) conference is a big deal — a thousand high-level attendees, important topics, world-class projects and presenters, and … well, a banquet. How many events do you go to with a banquet? Before the glitz and glamour (and songs), a lot of serious business. A recap:
- No, Bentley has not yet completed its initial public offering. CEO Greg Bentley said that he is patient and continues to wait out the market volatility that’s slowing down not only Bentley’s but other IPOs as well. His comments did nothing to stop speculation, especially given the focus on infrastructure investment during the US presidential election and the huge interest in AEC in general because of the very successful IPO of Australian Aconex. Mr. Bentley said that he hopes to have more news at the 2017 edition of the Year in Infrastructure.
- After the event ended, Bentley announced that its relationship with Siemens was taking a financial turn, with Siemens acquiring an unspecified amount of Bentley stock in exchange for €70 million. Bentley and Siemens are going to invest a further €50 million in joint R&D centered on project delivery and asset performance. It was a particularly opaque press release, but it’s likely that this mean tighter linkage between Bentley’s AssetWise portfolio of performance monitoring solutions and Siemens’ MindSphere (for online monitoring of globally distributed industrial equipment) and/or Omneo, the cloud based, SaaS solution that provides visibility into product and supply chain performance. Not to mention continuing work on integrating Bentley’s point cloud solutions with Siemens PLM’s factory modeling solutions and tightening the integration between Siemens Comos and Bentley’s OpenPlant for 0D-3D plant design. A few days after this press release hit the wires, Siemens said it intended to acquire Mentor Graphics; there’s no reason it couldn’t also acquire the shares of Bentley that it doesn’t already own, but even its pockets aren’t infinitely deep — it’s likely that Bentley will go for $3 billion or more, which is a lot when added to Mentor’s price of $4.5 billion. [Note: I have been wrong before.]
- A number of the product announcements at YII highlighted a move to integrate non-engineering disciplines into typical design workflows. One that I was really taken by is the ability to model the cost of building a road while designing it. OpenRoads CONNECT Edition is the successor to Bentley’s InRoads, GEOPAK, MX, and PowerCivil brands, and is intended to be used to model roadway projects from conceptual design through construction. I’m more a mechanical than a civil engineer, but even I can see the benefits when OpenRoads Designer starts with traditional engineering workflows to plan, profile, and create roadway cross-sections, then uses 3D parametric modeling to truly master the design. In other words: I need to connect points A and B with a road that’s 2 lanes wide plus a shoulder on each side that X feet wide. Working within a reality capture model of the surrounding terrain, I can add in survey data, geological information, drainage, underground utilities, existing signage or other obstacles, and other real-world components. That will make a darned good road. But then OpenRoads enables designers to make financial trade-offs to balance “best” with “reasonable/affordable”. THEN –and this is the really cool part– it creates “NC” instructions for automated machine control and field positioning systems for excavation, graders, paving equipment and the other machinery that clutters up a construction site. From engineering concept to final design, from an engineers thoughts to machine instructions — and making a taxpayer-funded project as cost-effective as possible. That’s so cool.
- ProjectWise, Bentley’s project collaboration and content management platform, went a little bit more cloud this year, with Mr. Bentley emphasizing its integration with Microsoft Azure to connect design, delivery and operations environments — anywhere in the world, securely, on-premise or in the cloud (or both). New at YII 2016, I believe, was the “Cloud Services Subscription”, which doesn’t charge per server but per user, billed monthly. This is a great recognition of the fact that AEC projects 1. don’t happen in offices (or even on one continent, in many cases); 2. that staffing shifts constantly –in number, in role, in access needs; and 3. that AEC projects are typically reimbursed after the fact, making big capital outlays at the start too difficult for many. Turning this into pay-as-you-go ties more closely to the way AEC projects are structured and will make it easier for more teams to adopt ProjectWise.
- There was a terrific presentation by Microsoft‘s David Epp, who gave a human face to the tech giant. Rather than starting with a typical “We’re Microsoft and we’re big”, he spoke about how “We make instruments, you make music” and “We put wind in your sails” — so much better than tech babble, and a great way to get people to actually listen to a sponsor presentation. Mr. Epp reinforced how hard Microsoft works to secure its data centers, saying that no one human has both physical and logical access to the same server (among many other precautions) and explained how quickly the company is growing its data center footprints.
- Reality capture and its integration into the CAD world continues to astound. So many of the projects highlighted at YII used laser scanning, photogrammetry and other capture techniques (and drones, lots of drones) that it feels almost mainstream, at least among this elite group of projects.
- Expanding on the use of reality capture plus design data, virtual reality featured large in many aspects of YII. From using cheap headsets like Google Cardboard to give project stakeholders a real sense for the look and feel of a roadway or other public project, to using more sophisticated headsets to help train asset operators, virtual reality in AEC is set to explode. (A number of the EPCs I spoke with at YII and elsewhere are waiting for the technology to settle on specific standards; they don’t want to invest in Betamax when VHS turns out to be the winner. My response: start now but don’t get thousands of the headsets. Learn what you want to do with VR so that you’re ready when the tech goes more mainstream.)
- There were announcements across too many products to cover here; did you know that Bentley is consolidating from over 600 — but still has more than 300? Check the link below for your favorites.
The main highlight of the event is, of course, the Be Inspired awards. Hundreds of projects apply for consideration; 3 in each of 18 categories are invited to YII to make the case for why they should win. Again this year I was on the Manufacturing and Offshore jury; our two categories had something like 50 project submission that we had to winnow down to 6 –a hard, hard job– and then pick a single winner in each category. If only we could have had three-way ties … The winners were announced at the banquet:
- ONGC (of India) for its ambitious project to extend the life of aging offshore platforms and
- in manufacturing, Unipar Carbocloro of Brazil, which used 3D plant design technology to design and communicate about equipment changes during a planned shutdown.
You can see a full list of the winners here but, honestly, all of the projects are worth a bit of your time to investigate.
Bottom line? While there’s still a lot to do on the design and engineering front, at YII 2016 Bentley seemed less focused on creating models and data, and more on making this available in new ways, perhaps to new users. Yes, drawings and other deliverables still need to be created but there’s so much potential locked up in those models. Just one more example: Bentley announced a new relationship with Topcon, maker of precise geolocation systems. Together, the companies plan to create new construction workflows, enabled by cloud services, to improve efficiency and productivity on the job site. How? Bentley’s ProjectWise CONNECT Edition will feed data into Topcon’s MAGNET sitework products. Sending data back the other way, Topcon will use Bentleys’ (really cool) ContextCapture to process the images collected via Topcon’s drones. Combining their technologies, the companies argue, will enable designers to start from the reality-captured drone survey data; everyone concerned can then use those models, updated as necessary, throughout construction. Greater accuracy, less waiting around on the job site for instructions, integrating as-built images as needed — all designed to make use of information that’s readily available but has not necessarily been easy to get at.
Bentley has made a lot of resources from the event available, here, in its virtual press kit.
Note: Bentley Systems graciously covered some of the expenses associated with my participation in the event but did not in any way influence the content of this post. The title image is of CEO Greg Bentley during his keynote, courtesy of Bentley Systems.
The title is a reference to the fact that Bentley’s Chris Barron typically opens and closes the gala banquet with songs — custom-written lyrics about infrastructure, technology and the Be Inspired projects, set to some popular, recognizable song. This year, Mr. Barron opened the event with Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” and closed with Adele’s “Hello”. Very funny –and very well done. Look here; the opening number is at 3:55 and the big finish is at 1:04:00. Thanks to Shawn Foster, aka @kcflatlander, for the pointer.