Q&A Tuesday: AVEVA, Bentley IoT, Geometric and earnings podcasts

Yes, I know it’s Wednesday. But it IS a Q&A, so let’s get to it:

AVEVA NET Shell

I’m going to guess that this reader was looking for information on Shell’s use of AVEVA Net. Shell was an early AVEVA Net adopter, using it on a project in China more than 10 years ago. Since then, Shell has been a showcase user of AVEVA’s new Engage application, which puts a visual front end on data stored and managed in AVEVA NET. One example: Shell designed the Olympus platform with PDMS and uses AVEVA NET Engage to show construction status and progress from Excel and to visualize all sorts of other content in a web browser. I can’t find the video of users playing with the Olympus data set at AVEVA World Summit in 2014, but here’s my write-up of it at the time; the bottom picture in the blog post is of the Shell platform. And you can look here for a video on AVEVA Engage (thanks, David, for the link!).

Bentley IoT

This is an interesting question/search because Bentley has been doing Internet of Things, aka IoT, for quite a while but comes at it from a different angle than other PLMish vendors. As an AEC-focused company, it wants to help owner/operators like oil companies, universities and departments of transportation operate their assets most effectively; it’s not concerned with how the air handling unit is designed, only how that air handling unit affects the overall asset. Bentley acquired Ivara in 2012 to bring the asset performance management discipline and packaged software solutions to its customers so that they could implement asset-specific reliability strategies. How do you do that? By gathering data on how your equipment is performing. Bentley keeps adding to the offering, mot recently with the addition of C3global, which makes Amulet operational analytics. That’s big data for predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Geometric and HCL

HCL Technologies Limited  announced in April that  it is acquiring those parts of Geometric that weren’t part of a joint venture with Dassault Systemes. As of today, Geometric continues to operate as a solo entity that will release earnings on August 9, when we should also get an update on the status of the HCL deal. I believe these things generally take about 6 months in India; if you know otherwise, please leave a comment below.

Should public companies podcast earnings?

It depends on what you mean by podcast. Most public companies already webcast their earnings calls and offer replays so that you can listen to them after the live broadcast. Check your favorite public company’s Investor Relations page to find links to the most recent calls.

If you’re asking about a podcast that you can download to a media player, I know of a few companies that do that but none in our PLMish universe. Apple, for example, releases podcasts of its earnings calls on iTunes. Makes sense, since they have a lot of individual investors, fanboys/fangirls and an army of developer partners who are interested in Apple announcements and for whom podcasts are a natural medium. Our PLMish universe tends to be dominated by institutional investors so technology that aims to bring earnings broadcasts to the mass-market isn’t really needed.

That’s it for now. If you have a question you’d like to see answered, please email us!