Bentley Systems Year In Infrastructure 2020 Virtual Focuses on Digital Twins for All Users

This year’s Bentley Year In Infrastructure event was as most conferences this year, held remotely. Press from over 28 countries attended.

Press Day was characterized by CEO Greg Bentley’s opening remarks include noting the IPO on September 23^rd, which will be followed by analytic research.

2020 began for Bentley Systems with 4 or 5% down in revenues in March and climbed back up by 4% by May and June. “With 4D construction modeling, our SYNCHRO construction modeling and safety in terms of distancing, we expect growth in 4D construction modeling to continue to grow. We are in the process of developing a Resilience Response Force so that we can have readiness, response, and recovery with resilience through Digital Twins.

Colleagues are set up to work from home as everything has been digitalized. ProjectWise was a saving grace for virtualizing their work in the world.

Infrastructure sustains our economy and environment at the same time. Infrastructure engineering is empowered by infrastructure engineering software and introducing ourselves to investors, we think of ourselves as the infrastructure engineering software company.”

FutureON

For investors Bentley broke down revenues by infrastructure sector and disciplines – commercial/ facilities, industrial/resources/ roads and bridges, electric transmission and distribution, municipal and mapping, rail and transit, water and wastewater, which constitute public works and utilities.

Bentley spoke about revenues by infrastructure and discipline referring to data from the Oxford Economics Outlook – Global Infrastructure Spending 2016 through 2040 and the importance of the project lifecycle and the asset lifecycle. “We believe we lead the market in roads and bridges, and public works and utilities,” noted Bentley.

• Roads comprise 1.0% of GDP
• Electricity 1.0% of GDP
• Rail 0.4% GDP
• Water 0.2% GDP

Infrastructure Spending through 2016-2040 comprises

• 0% of GDP
• Average/year:
• $3,200,000,000,000 $3.2T
• $79 T

Reality Modeling has grown 35% since 2018 in the YII nominated projects. ITwin services brings systems together with applications. “Where we are now is being able to converge to 4D digital twins, federated and aligned simulation to complete the lifecycle and make it evergreen.”

Bentley Systems (Nasdaq: BSY) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced an expansion of a strategic alliance focused on advancing infrastructure for smart city urban planning and smart construction. The alliance will combine Microsoft’s Azure IoT Digital Twins and Azure Maps with Bentley Systems’ iTwins platform, enabling engineers, architects, constructors and city planners to work within a comprehensive city-scale digital twin, empowering better decision-making, optimizing operational efficiency, reducing costs and improving collaboration.

Shell’s deepwater business has selected Bentley Systems’ digital twin approach to streamline the process of its capital projects and accelerate ‘first oil’ time.

Comprehensive includes the disciplines of infrastructure, for example a train station and vertical building, blend with horizontal infrastructure of utility and roads access. With Digital Twin capability and cloud services, Bentley can make digital twins available to all users. Half of global infrastructure spend in coming years will come from Asia. Infrastructure professionals have learned they can work on projects from anywhere in the world.

Comprehensiveness enables

• Sustainability: climate mitigation, resilience, adaptation
• Industrialization of infrastructure project delivery
• Design/Build/Operate contracting private infrastructure

Santanu Das, Chief Acceleration Officer for Bentley, said Acceleration helps Bentley invest in Digital Twins organically but also 3^rd party ecosystems as well. Moving from CAD to BIM to Digital Twins allows people to work together through the phases. Companies try to migrate into this world. “We’re set up to provide capital and subject matter expertise to help them get going, but in determining investments, Bentley is

• expanding into new sectors
• exploring new growth initiatives
• looking at undervalued projects and/or geographies
• developing new products/services
• investing in Digital Twins ISV’s
• Investing in Digital Integrators

The iTwins platform is central to both the project lifecycle and the asset lifecycle. ProjectWise, SYNCHRO, ComplyPro, ProcureWare, Control and Field are the components of Bentley’s project delivery. AssetWise ALIM, AssetWise Asset Reliability, AssetWise Enterprise Interoperability, SUPERLOAD and OpenUtilities are the components of Asset and Network Performance. For design integration the applications include MicroStation, OpenRoads, OpenRail, OpenPlant, OpenBuildings, OpenBridge, OpenSite, OpenWindPower and Open Tower for Modeling. For Simulation applications used include STAAD, PLAXIS, RAM, LEAP, SACS, MOSES, SITEOPS, AutoPipe, LumenRT, CUBE. Digital Cities’ application include for modeling: ContextCapture, OpenCities Planner, OpenCities Map, OpenFlows, OpenGround, and for simulation: LEGION and CUBE.

Virtuosity e-commerce transaction space has been created so you can use products easily. New products include Digital Twins for Water Networks. Water 365 will address municipality in real time to see how water is behaving. There is a Digital Twins for Telecom Towers growth stage initiative, as many 4G to 5G operations are having trouble around the world, A new dishes are required, and most of these assets haven’t been inspected.

You have to get status for a particular asset, and it requires climbing towers that’s unsafe, etc. “We are investing in new geographies,” said Das. “Not only do we provide Digital Twins but also capital subject matter expertise, iTwins technology, and we’re not like other venture capital but provide additional support for success in the form of the Acceleration Fund.”

Bentley has the iTwin Partner Program with FutureOn and the Cohesive Group which is an important component of the Acceleration Fund.

Since last year when Digital Construction Works was formed, Bentley has shown a fondness for companies that can be separate from them and yet do some specific consulting that also provides an outreach for working withIn other environments.

Noah Eckhouse, CEO, Cohesive Companies, a subsidiary of Bentley, explained that they are a company of consultants separate from Bentley and can work with PCSG Advisory Services for build environment owners. Bentley has worked alongside PCSG for over a decade. The Cohesive team is entirely independent and clients hold a deep trust in them, according to Eckhouse.  “They are a critical enzyme to speed absorption of true change. We expect this acquisition to deliver more value over a wider footprint.”

Nicholas Cumin, Chief Product Officer, Bentley, said “To advance infrastructure (the goal of Bentley) we want to impact people’s lives by providing great software. The vector of transformation is Digital Twins. We’ve seen its impact in all industries, in aerospace in particular. Our platform is used by many to create Digital Twin applications. We’re evolving our applications to be iTwin enabled to help make faster and better decisions.”

Dustin Parkman, vice president, Project Delivery, Bentley spoke on the topic: What efficiencies can drive constructions?

Parkman said that it is now more difficult. “Now more than ever contractors, engineering firms, and owners need better transparency into their projects. Digital Twin technologies represent a breakthrough to enable this.

Hyper-distributed project teams can be enabled of all sizes to better enable engineering teams to work from home. Deliverables across all disciplines in 365 allow teams to deliver in real time a new task-based interface, and helps the whole team stay on time and in budget. This makes it easier for teams to review in real time. ProjectWise 365 project insights can do large or small visibility to understand if their project is on track and where liens in the project exist.

We’ve significantly expanded Synchro’s portfolio – animation sequencing is all available directly through web browsers. 4D simulation will instantly collaborate real time with a link to provide project details back to the project manager. The new visualization capability allows you to provide traffic patterns and water modeling and can model and manage quantities.”

The  acquisition of Noteball earlier this year – all using voice based transcription technology and the Route BC acquisition – is integrating with the entire portfolio. This federated common data environment was pioneered by Highways England, allowing advanced collaborative BIM. The recent release of Business Collaborator allows you to understand a natural intuitive collaborative context through an interface that requires no knowledge of data that’s behind the portfolio.

“We’re now making Business Collaborator part of the whole project delivery system,” said Parkman.

Alan Kiraly, Senior Vice President, Asset and Network Performance, Bentley, spoke on how Digital Twins facilitates the reliability of assets we have now, and how you can make brownfield assets last longer.

“We can maximize the use of data that already exists,” said Kiraly. “We have data in disparate systems. Siemens’ integration brings all data together and extends that to Reliability systems and AssetWise. There are features added to PlantSite on the construction side. Take existing P&ID schematics and scan those then using machine learning recognition systems relate those to the Digital Twin.”

Customers are now using Digital Twins in operations and making it part of their business process. A new offering, Siemens Energy Asset Performance Oil & Gas, combines with Siemens’ knowledge of processing plants and pressure technology.

Alternative energy sources’ grid networks traditionally would be modeled two-three times per year, but now you need that information daily. You can make a digital grid and keep that model updated and get decisions on demand, improving inspections and compliance reporting while building a digital twin.

Bob Mankowski, Digital Cities, Bentley Systems

Bob Mankowski, Senior Vice President of Digital Cities, Bentley, said that with the impact of Covid on services lockdown and phased reopening, and impact of it on their budgets, U.S. cities could be facing $350 B shortfall in the next years. The question is how to continue operations of existing infrastructure efficiently and safely.

“There is real ROI to be gained by using Digital Twins,” said Mankowski. “In Digital Cities we’ve been emphasizing improving understanding with context – unless it flies or floats – every existing infrastructure project has to do with land, and we are capturing, managing, and analyzing data within Digital Twins.”

iTwins have enabled OpenCities planners, and bring together cityscale Digital Twins, and creates an engagement platform.

“Now they have allowed architects and engineers to bring their BIMs into that environment so their models have the context of the overall city. By doing subsurface with our OpenGround solution, field workers can capture and sync to the cloud the subsurface data they’re collecting, reducing errors. Streetlytics is used for mobility of Digital Twins, and has been available in the U.S. and now available in Canada for multimodal networks and now people move through it on a daily basis.”

Tags: Bentley Systems, climate change, cloud, crowdsourcing, data, geospatial, GIS, location, mapping, maps, mobile, satellite imagery

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