BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 4 - (Page 36)

GEOSPATIAL In Conversation With Greg Bentley GIS Development’s Sanjay Kumar recently visited Bentley’s U.S. headquarters for an exclusive interview with Bentley’s CEO H ow has Bentley evolved over the years? What have been the changing patterns in the company? Bentley, which is now 22 years old, has come a long way from the launch of MicroStation for the personal computer. Now, with much more powerful PCs, MicroStation provides a robust 3D graphics environment to map, design, and visualize infrastructure assets of any type. It is not only a software application, it is also our desktop software platform. Likewise, ProjectWise is our server platform. On these foundation products we develop applications for use in various ﬁelds relating to the diverse classes of infrastructure. Thanks to the growth in our portfolio of software, we now see our mission as “providing software for the world’s infrastructure.” To carry out that mission, we have both developed products ourselves and acquired a number of technology companies, especially since 2000. And to better gratifying growth (our revenues rose more than 15 percent from 2005 to 2006), and our geospatial business has contributed strongly to that growth. How is Bentley spread worldwide and what are its business propositions? Perhaps the most distinguishing factor about our company is the degree to which we are a global concern. Finance, back ofﬁce, marketing functions, and so on are largely centralized, but the teams for each of these are distributed. Our development group, Bentley Software, has 60 locations and only four of them have more than 50 colleagues. So Bentley is now truly a worldwide business. Our revenues reﬂect that worldwide scope, especially in geospatial, where we have a somewhat larger business in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia than we do in the Americas. I believe strongly that the contributions of colleagues from all addresses the telecommunications service providers, electric and gas utilities, water utilities, and governmental agencies. In essence, our geospatial vertical delivers solutions for networked assets that need to be managed in a spatial environment. What role does geospatial technology play in the infrastructure domain? We excel in the area where GIS and infrastructure lifecycle management intersect. meet the needs of our software users, we have organized our business through four verticals, enabling R&D, marketing, and sales to focus on their respective domains and establish closer relationships with our users. Given the interests of your readers, let me focus on our geospatial vertical, where our strategy is “advancing GIS for infrastructure.” This vision means that we do not compete across all GIS applications, but that we excel in the area where GIS and infrastructure lifecycle management intersect. In general, our business has seen around the world provide tremendous richness, insight, and balancing perspectives. Indeed, a majority of our colleagues are now employed outside North America. Our business proposition is to develop the most comprehensive and powerful set of infrastructure software in the world and to deliver that through our vertical organizations. Again, your readers will naturally be most interested in the solutions delivered by our civil and geospatial verticals. Our civil vertical provides solutions for road and rail infrastructure and site development, and our geospatial portfolio These are exciting times for geospatial technology. The ﬁeld is growing strongly around the world, and at the same time is changing. The traditional GIS model of recording the location of assets is no longer enough. Users want to improve the performance of assets, which requires a synthesis of analysis, design, and asset management. Indian Railways and Survey of India fall into this category. At the same time, the Google Earth™ phenomenon reﬂects an intense demand to model the world as we see it, in photorealistic 3D. One implication of this change is less reliance on the symbolic representations of maps and drawings and the emergence of innovative ways of presenting information. 36 BE MAGAZINE | Volume 4, Issue 4

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 4

BE Magazine - Volume 4, issue 4 Contents The Drive To Innovate News BE Newsletter Highlights Converging on the Market Bytes and Bricks Generative Components Building Courting Success Remodeling an Icon Structural Integration Building News From Bentley Civil Greenfield Airport Takes Flight Good Neighbors Collaborative Innovation Civil News From Bentley Advertisers Index Geospatial Ring of Fiber Revolutionizing Integrity Management Port City Transformation In Conversation With Greg Bentley Geospatial News From Bentley Plant Single-Source Service Committed to Cleaner Air Expediting Expansion Plant News From Bentley Strength in Numbers The Art of Visualization A Winning Legacy Zero Change Culture: Further Definition A Remarkable Collaboration With a Forward-Thinking Community

BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 4

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