BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 4 - (Page 37)

GEOSPATIAL This year we take another step forward with our “Athens” release, in which any work done in MicroStation, or in any Bentley application, will be “geo-coordinated.” This is a good example of the positive feedback loop from the vertical applications that we develop back into the platform. These changes leave Bentley’s geospatial vertical well-placed to capitalize on a burgeoning market. As if to echo our strategy of advancing GIS for infrastructure, the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) in the United States has recently changed its focus from openended GIS to infrastructure. Its new slogan is “GITA—We Are Infrastructure.” How do you position interoperability? Interoperability is at the heart of Bentley’s technology vision and strategic differentiation. We are uniquely capable and committed to delivering both “intra-operability” (where all of Bentley’s products work seamlessly together, given their common while the project still beneﬁts from information reuse. For example, MicroStation interchangeably reads and writes AutoCAD DWG ﬁles as well as its DGN format, and the Bentley Geospatial Server adeptly handles all the major ﬁle types encountered in any geospatial environment. Also, we are increasingly meeting needs, for infrastructure operations, to interoperate with enterprise applications such as SAP. A good example of this is our recent project for the Dutch Ministry of Finance, where we implemented groundbreaking integration between the Bentley Geospatial Server and SAP Real Estate. We do not believe that proprietary data formats and databases have a long-term future in the geospatial environment. We believe that software users should own their own data in a neutral environment, and that this data needs to be shared with the applications that access it—applications that will probably come from multiple vendors. This means users have wider choices to link and relate the semantics of engineering and planning information as well. Federation is the future, rather than trying to force-ﬁt information of different types and scales into a single database model. How are you investing in the Bentley R&D organization? Worldwide GIS/Geospatial Revenue Desktop/Personal Computer $350 $300 $250 Millions $200 $150 $100 $50 $0 ESRI Bentley Intergraph Autodesk GE Energy Leica MapInfo Geosystems SICAD Geomatic Tekla PCI Geomatics As a privately held company, Bentley is uniquely able to maintain our commitment to reinvestment in research and development. As we have grown our revenues ﬁve-fold over the last 12 years, our 20 percent reinvestment has commensurately increased in wherewithal and results. We have invested over $500 million in R&D and acquisitions since 1995, and over $200 million of that just in the last two years. In 2007, we introduced two new objectives in our R&D program. First, we recognized that our applications portfolio has become so comprehensive as to merit dedicated resources to target and advance solutions—combinations of our products and services—for particular infrastructure asset classes such as railways, utility and water networks, and now bridges. Secondly, we introduced an explicit “applied research” function, aimed at adapting innovations developed elsewhere, for infrastructure IT, where we recognized a lot of “white space” for potential improvement. Our initial priorities have to do with work packaging and construction, visualization, and we’re already productizing some of this applied research in our Athens release next year. Bentley has been taking a lot of interest in acquisitions. What factors inﬂuence your decisions about acquisitions? © 2006 Daratech, Inc. v Bentley was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study desktop and server platforms) and interoperability, where Bentley software will work with other applications and ﬁle formats. We have to embrace both the inherent complexity of infrastructure projects and the inevitable challenge that multiple parties will be involved in big projects, in which not everyone will be using the same software. The interoperability we support enables these distributed enterprise participants to preserve their technology choice, in ﬁle formats and don’t have to change their tool sets. We believe strongly in the federated information paradigm, where applications maintain their native data but expose it for access by other applications, at the appropriate level of abstraction. Google has shown the great virtue of this concept for text-based search, to start with. The Bentley Geospatial Server similarly relies on indexing and search/ﬁnd capabilities, in this case Acquisitions of discipline- and asset-class speciﬁc infrastructure applications are very valuable to our user organizations, and thus to Bentley, to complete our comprehensive solutions portfolio. And we have the beneﬁt of a “target-rich environment,” as such applications already cater for our platform and the APIs that we support. Integrating them for intra-operability is straightforward for us, as a result. Just as importantly, our many annual acquisitions bring us intensive domain Volume 4, Issue 4 | BE MAGAZINE 37

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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