CEO Greg Bentley held a press briefing on October 20 at the Be Inspired event in Amsterdam, where he made several announcements: one being the launch of the Bentley Infrastructure 500 – modeled after Fortune 500 – which would identify Bentley customers who are especially successful. Bentley said their business represents $13 trillion in revenue.

This determination is made based on reported net tangible fixed assets – the balance sheet view of the infrastructure. “

These are some of the facts about the companies:

– 92 of top 100 are Bentley Subscribers

– 61 of the top 100 have adopted ProjectWise

– 40 of the top 100 have adopted Navigator

Most top candidates are private companies, coming from geographically diverse locations – all over the world.

The economy is a player in this situation – during a year like this one, the exchange rate is volatile. Many public entities are valued based on cost and others may be valued for what they could sell for. Because of the economy, many infrastructure companies have been working off backlog and have been resourceful in this way. Bentley said this may coincide with employment statistics.

He went on to say that “flat” pretty much describes Bentley’s financial growth right now.

Revenues went down almost 10% in 2009. In 2010 to date, revenues have been reported to be “within sight of 2008 revenues. By the end of the year Bentley predicts their run rate will be back to what it was before 2009. “Maybe our organic growth is the new growth,” he said.

New Bentley products coming up:

– The V8i portfolio extends through various disciplines and operations.

– OpenPlant Modeler extends breadth of applications offerings.

– Navigator v8i addresses information modeling in construction – constructors want to resolve conflicts with “dynamic collaboration”. New functionality in upcoming release will deliver bidirectional schedule synchronization with Microsoft Project or Primavera and introduces new markup templates.

– Interest in 3D cities requires the ability to relate information together in a BIM model.

– Civil Engineer for Geotechnical Analysis passport subscription – geotechnical professionals will get to pick from a variety of modules from a dashboard – cantilever wall, spread footing, slope stability, etc.

– ProjectWise v8i SelectSeries 3 introduces a Navigator web part to view i-models in a browser or SharePoint 2010 web parts.

– ProjectWise Dynamic Plot v8i SelectSeries 2 enables dynamic plots to be published from PDFs as well as from DGNS and DWGs.

-ConstructSIM will be integrated with ProjectWise Navigator in the next release.

– Bentley Substation v8i is a standalone application with deeper integration with ProjectWise to increase enterprise support for i-models. It also includes embedded point cloud capability.

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– Bentley Pipe Renewal Planner

This morning in Amsterdam, the weather alternated between sun, clouds and rain. At the Hotel Okura, COO Malcom Walter welcomed attendees to Bentley’s Be Inspired Conference, an event that recognizes outstanding infrastructure projects around the world. Attendees came from all over the world to see presentations by competition finalists.

Walter showed a video of the first miner in the Chilean mine disaster as he was brought to the surface to emphasize the human side to infrastructure.

The Netherlands is known for its infrastructure – the very existence of the country has depended on windmills and dykes that keep land and sea separate. Walter said that without infrastructure to pump water and keep it in bay, everything would be under water.

This year there will be video recordings of the finalists’ presentations available on the Bentley website.

CEO Greg Bentley talked about resilience and helping the world be more resilient. “We define infrastructure as the way we improve our planet,” he said.

He showed some slides that highlighted the use of Bentley products through out the recession. Bentley pointed out that after the recession hit, there have been more people in front of MicroStation, and although that might be good in some ways, it also means that people are working more hours now.

Other facts:

1)New countries are now reporting usage that weren’t before this year.

2) Bentley has seen growth in Europe’s MicroStation utilization hours.

3) Asia has never had a recession.

4) Infrastructure and plant have had a hard time sustaining growth, geospatial and civil has had some growth.

5) Bentley has achieved some growth in 2010.

6) Projectwise passport adoption has grown greatly in 2010 and is used by the majority of top Design 100 firms.

7) Bentley is ranked #2 in the geospatial market according to Daratech.

8) Dutch municipalities – over 50% use Bentley technology for urban planning, road design, GIS and mapping workflows.