About Bentley Systems

Bentley Systems, Incorporated, together with its subsidiaries, operates as a global provider of infrastructure engineering software solutions for professionals and organizations involved in the project delivery and operational performance of infrastructure assets. The company is dedicated to advancing infrastructure through its comprehensive software solutions that span engineering disciplines, assets, and lifecycle processes. The company’s integrated software platform encompasses both the design and construction of infrastructure, which the company refers to as project delivery, and the operation of infrastructure assets, which the company refers to as asset performance. The company’s software solutions are designed to enable information mobility for a more complete flow of information among applications, across distributed project teams, from offices to the field, and throughout the infrastructure lifecycle. Its solutions extend the reach and scope of digital engineering models from the project delivery phase into the asset performance phase of the infrastructure lifecycle, which enables engineers to make infrastructure assets more intelligent and sustainable. Users of the company’s solutions include engineers and construction professionals who collaborate on project delivery, and owner-operators who maintain, adapt, and optimize the performance of infrastructure assets. The company enables infrastructure professionals and their organizations, by ‘going digital’ through the company’s software and cloud services offerings, to better design, build, and operate better infrastructure. The company’s enduring commitment is to develop and support the most comprehensive portfolio of integrated software offerings across professional disciplines, project and asset lifecycles, infrastructure sectors, and geographies. The company’s software enables digital workflows across engineering disciplines, across distributed project teams, and from offices to the field. The company delivers its solutions via on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. The company’s users engineer, construct, and operate projects and assets across the following infrastructure sectors: Public works (including roads, rail, bridges, tunnels, airports, ports, and federal, state, and municipal agencies)/utilities (including networks for electricity, gas, communications, and water, wastewater, and drainage). Resources (including mining, oil and gas ‘upstream,’ offshore, pipelines, environmental management, and renewable energy). Industrial (including discrete and process manufacturing, oil and gas ‘downstream,’ and power generation). Commercial/facilities (including office buildings, retail facilities, hospitals, and campuses). The company addresses both the project and asset lifecycle phases of infrastructure, each with applications and enterprise information systems. The company’s Project Lifecycle solutions encompass conception, planning, surveying, design, engineering, simulation, and construction, as well as the collaboration offerings required to coordinate and share the work of interdisciplinary and/or distributed project teams. The company’s Asset Lifecycle solutions span the operating life of commissioned infrastructure assets, allowing the company’s accounts to manage engineering changes for safety and compliance and to model performance and reliability to support operating and maintenance decisions. Solutions The company offers solutions for enterprises and professionals across the infrastructure lifecycle. The company’s Engineering Applications and Geoprofessional Applications support the breadth of engineering and geoprofessional disciplines and are primarily desktop applications for professional practitioners. The company’s project delivery and asset performance Enterprise Systems are provided via cloud and hybrid environments, developed respectively to extend enterprise collaboration during project delivery, and to manage and leverage engineering information during operations and maintenance. The company’s Industry Solutions solve domain-specific problems for owners of infrastructure assets, and the project delivery ecosystems that support these owners. The company’s cloud-native iTwin Platform solutions enable digital twin workflows, which can span project and asset lifecycles. The company’s comprehensive solutions for the entire project delivery and asset performance lifecycle—spanning conception, planning, surveying, subsurface, design, simulation, construction, and operations—include Engineering Applications, Geoprofessional Applications, Enterprise Systems, Industry Solutions, and the company’s iTwin Platform for infrastructure digital twins. Engineering Applications: The company’s Engineering Applications are for modeling and simulation. The company’s modeling applications are domain-specific authoring tools used by professionals for the 3D design and documentation of infrastructure assets. The company’s simulation applications enable engineers to analyze the functional performance of the designs created with the company’s modeling applications (or those of competitive vendors), preferably in iterative digital workflows, to improve engineering outcomes and to ensure compliance with design codes. Geoprofessional Applications: The company’s Geoprofessional Applications support modeling and simulation to help engineers and scientists develop a detailed understanding, and take full account of, near and deep subsurface conditions. The company’s acquisition of Seequent Holdings Limited (‘Seequent’) added industry-leading earth modeling, subsurface-data management, and geoprofessional team collaboration software to the company’s portfolio. The integration of these sophisticated technologies in combination with the company’s existing geotechnical products, supplements visible built asset representations above ground with more probabilistic modeling of invisible subsurface conditions – deepening the potential of infrastructure digital twins. Enterprise Systems: The company’s Enterprise Systems, which span the end-to-end lifecycle and value chain of the world’s infrastructure, support data management and collaborative workflows for both project delivery and asset performance. The company’s Enterprise Systems combine to form the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, encompassing ProjectWise, for project delivery, SYNCHRO, for construction; and AssetWise, for asset operations. This data-centric, federated environment leverages digital twin workflows, powered by iTwin, to open up data contained in engineering files through automated and intrinsic mapping to the company’s infrastructure schemas. These schemas are open and extensible, and can link to reality modeling and Internet of Things (‘IoT’) devices, thereby creating the potential for unifying, cloud-based solutions across the lifecycle of infrastructure engineering. Project Delivery Systems: The company’s Project Delivery systems support information and document management, engineering-specific collaboration and work-sharing for distributed project teams and enterprises, and construction planning, modeling and execution. The scope of these solutions is not limited to users of only the company’s own engineering applications. The company’s software assures that the rapidly-changing data are managed in a common data environment (‘CDE’) such that only the correct milestone versions can be shared and referenced across the project, while embedded digital twin workflows, powered by iTwin, enable interdisciplinary design review and advanced design validation to improve the effectiveness and quality of designs and the integration of reality modeling data. This functionality enables infrastructure project organizations to ‘virtualize’ their talent so that the required work can be shared by all participants everywhere through the company’s software, reducing the need for physical co-location of the project resources. Users of the company’s Project Delivery systems can also apply analytics at the level of engineering fidelity across all projects, learn from and reuse rich project data, and retain knowledge to enhance the quality and efficiency of future projects. The company’s SYNCHRO 4D construction modeling software spatially and temporally integrates a project’s 3D engineering models into its construction schedules to assess sequencing strategies and to visualize and understand planned and actual progress over the project timeline. The company’s solutions also enable project delivery teams to optimally define and manage discrete engineering, construction, and installation work packages, including the construction trades’ ‘workface planning,’ which considers crafts and materials by day and zone. For work packages, which increasingly take advantage of modular offsite fabrication and manufacturing, the company’s software manages and enables 4D visualization of the necessary spatial and logistical interfaces, which enable users to, among other things, perform virtual walk-throughs, query model information, and analyze embedded property data using a simple web browser. Asset Performance Systems: The company’s Asset Performance systems span the operating life of commissioned infrastructure assets, capturing and managing changes to engineering models and enterprise information for compliance and safety, and to model performance and reliability to support operating and maintenance decisions. The company’s Asset Performance systems are used to manage engineering information and geospatial relationships for operating and provisioning infrastructure across all sectors, including linear networks for transportation, energy transmission and distribution, water, and communications. The company’s asset performance modeling provides the needed analytical context for ‘right-time’ data, including from IoT sensor capabilities, to yield actionable insights. Industry Solutions: The company’s Industry Solutions solve domain-specific problems for owners of infrastructure assets, and the project delivery ecosystems that support these owners. These offerings span reality modeling, urban mobility simulation, and design and engineering of utility and communication networks; and support fit-for-purpose infrastructure digital twins through configurations of the company’s iTwin Platform. iTwin Platform The company’s iTwin Platform for infrastructure digital twin offerings, leveraging the company’s infrastructure schemas, enables the company’s users to create and curate cloud-native 4D/5D digital representations of physical infrastructure assets, incorporating underlying engineering information, federated with operational data, and then to model, simulate, analyze, chronicle, and predict performance over time. Using digital twins, the company’s users can more fully extend digital workflows across project delivery and asset performance, increasing the value of infrastructure engineers’ work. The company’s iTwin Platform powers the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud to add digital twin capabilities to the company’s project delivery, 4D construction, and asset performance offerings. It also supports an emerging ecosystem of third-party developers who can participate by using iTwin.js, an open-source development library, to develop desktop, mobile, or web apps that leverage the iTwin Platform or that augment iTwin products from the company or from other third parties. While iTwin.js is open source, use of the iTwin Platform or of the company’s products built on the iTwin Platform do require licenses from the company. Applications from Bentley Systems and third parties can participate in digital twin workflows through connectors, which enable any engineering file format to create an iModel, populating the iTwin Platform database. An iModel is a distributed database based on the company’s infrastructure schema. It maintains transactional information to manage change as data is added or changed. In 2022, the company took further advantage of the company’s iTwin Platform to introduce the following productized offerings: iTwin Experience: A cloud product that empowers owner-operators’ and their constituents’ insights into critical infrastructure by visualizing and navigating digital twins. iTwin Experience accelerates engineering firms’ ‘digital integrator’ initiatives to create and curate asset-specific digital twins, incorporating their proprietary machine learning, analytics, and asset performance algorithms. iTwin Experience acts as a ‘single pane of glass,’ overlaying engineering technology (‘ET’), operations technology (‘OT’), and information technology (‘IT’) to enable users to visualize, query, and analyze infrastructure digital twins in their full context, at any level of granularity, at any scale, all geo-coordinated and fully searchable. iTwin Capture: A solution for capturing, analyzing, and sharing reality data, that enables users to create engineering-ready, high resolution 3D models of infrastructure assets using drone video and survey imagery from any digital camera, scanner, or mobile mapping device. Infrastructure digital twins of any existing assets can accordingly start with reality modeling, rather than requiring building information modeling (‘BIM’). iTwin Capture offers the highest-fidelity and most versatile means of capturing reality to serve as the digital context for surveying, design, monitoring, and inspection processes. iTwin IoT: A solution for acquiring and analyzing sensor data, that enables users to incorporate IoT data created by sensors and condition monitoring devices. Infrastructure IoT can be used for real-time safety and risk monitoring in operations and construction activities, including to measure and visualize environmental changes, structural movement, or deterioration for condition assessment, maintenance scheduling, and to prompt precautionary interventions. By incorporating real-time data at scale from among hundreds of sensor types, iTwin IoT increases the value of engineering and geotechnical data. The iTwin Platform accordingly powers the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, which encompasses ProjectWise, for project delivery, SYNCHRO, for construction; and AssetWise, for asset operations. Software Offerings The company’s software offerings are managed within Engineering Applications, Geoprofessional Applications, Enterprise Systems, Industry Solutions, and iTwin Platform. Engineering Applications The company undertakes to provide comprehensive open modeling and open simulation applications for infrastructure design integration. The company’s open modeling applications include: MicroStation, for flexible 3D design and documentation providing the common modeling environment upon which the company’s applications are built; OpenRoads, for the planning, 3D design, and documentation of roads and highways; OpenRail, for the planning, 3D design, and documentation of rail and transit systems; OpenPlant, for the 2D and 3D design and documentation of process plants; OpenBuildings, for the 3D design and documentation of buildings and their integrated structural, HVAC, electrical, and plumbing systems; OpenBridge, for the 3D design and documentation of bridges; OpenSite, for the optimal planning, 3D design, and documentation of building, residential development, and infrastructure sites; and OpenFlows, for water, wastewater, and stormwater system planning, design, and operations, incorporating hydrological, hydraulic, and flood modeling. The company’s open simulation applications include: STAAD and RAM, for analysis and simulation respectively of infrastructure and building structural performance; ADINA, for nonlinear simulation and analysis; SACS, for analysis and simulation of offshore structural performance; MOSES, for analysis and simulation of floating structures; AutoPIPE, for analysis and simulation of pipe stress in industrial process plants; SITEOPS, for simulation of compliant site layout, and optimization of earthworks, drainage, and parking; CUBE, for multi-modal transportation network modeling and land-use modeling; EMME, for multimodal urban, regional, and transport planning; and LEGION, for pedestrian traffic simulation. Geoprofessional Applications The company undertakes to provide comprehensive modeling and simulation of near and deep subsurface conditions. The company’s applications include: Leapfrog, for 3D implicit modeling designed to rapidly integrate, communicate, and interpret geological data; AGS Workbench, for processing, inversion, and visualization of geophysical data; GeoStudio, for integrated geotechnical analysis for analyzing slope stability, groundwater flow, and heat and mass transfer in soil and rock; Imago, for the capture and management of drilling core images; MX Deposit, cloud drill hole software for simplifying and controlling how drill and other field data is collected, managed, and shared throughout the lifecycle of an ore deposit from early exploration through to mine production; Oasis montaj, for the quality control, correction, visualization, analysis, and interpretation of geophysical, geologic and geochemical data; PLAXIS, for geotechnical analysis to solve common and complex geotechnical problems, including advanced analysis for excavations, foundations, tunnels, and other infrastructure projects; and OpenGround, for geotechnical information management for collecting, reporting, managing, visualizing, analyzing, and accessing geotechnical data. Enterprise Systems The company’s Enterprise Systems, which include solutions for both project delivery and asset performance, are powered by the company’s iTwin Platform and infrastructure schemas, and integrate with the company’s engineering applications to enable better creation, delivery, and ongoing operation of better infrastructure, through complete and evergreen digital twins. These offerings, which combine to form the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, include the following: The company’s Project Delivery systems support collaboration, work-sharing, and 4D construction modeling for infrastructure project delivery enterprises and include: ProjectWise, for helping teams to manage, share, and distribute work-in-progress engineering content. ProjectWise enables all stakeholders involved in design and engineering to share and find information, conduct collaborative design reviews, and manage contractual exchanges faster for maximum team productivity; 4D Design Review, a ProjectWise service built on the iTwin Platform that allows project participants to leverage a digital twin throughout the project delivery lifecycle and that provides browser-level immersive visualization, change management, and project analytics. Through the company’s infrastructure schemas, this solution also aligns design file data across multiple disciplines for comprehensive 3D and 4D design reviews and across all projects to understand dependencies, and to reuse datasets, including for machine learning to develop proprietary analytics; and SYNCHRO, for 4D/5D construction modeling across schedule simulation and immersive virtual or augmented visualization; cloud-based construction operational solutions for project and field management; and advanced work packaging, inclusive of engineering, construction, and installation work packages, and trade and task workface planning. The company’s Asset Performance systems manage engineering information and geospatial relationships for operating and provisioning infrastructure across all sectors and include: AssetWise, for asset performance throughout the operations and maintenance lifecycle of infrastructure assets and their associated networks, in transportation, energy, and communications. AssetWise services include: AssetWise ALIM, for managing infrastructure asset information and linear networks and for controlling and managing change over the asset lifecycle; AssetWise Asset Reliability, for reducing equipment downtime and limiting business risk associated with equipment failures, while increasing safety, reliability, and cost effectiveness; AssetWise Enterprise Interoperability, for enabling access to multiple data sources from third-party providers, and integrating them in operations and maintenance workflows; AssetWise 4D Analytics, for employing advanced analytics and machine learning, particularly to IoT time series, to gather insights to understand current conditions and predict future performance; AssetWise Linear Network Management, for managing transportation network infrastructure and associated information including assets and linear events; and Seequent Central, a cloud solution designed for geoprofessional teams to visualize, track, integrate, and manage their subsurface data in a single, centralized, auditable environment. Industry Solutions The company’s Industry Solution offerings solve domain-specific problems for owners of infrastructure assets, and the project delivery ecosystems that support these owners. Many offerings extend AssetWise and/or leverage the iTwin Platform. Industry Solution offerings include: iTwin Experience, for empowering owner-operators’ and their constituents’ insights into critical infrastructure by visualizing and navigating digital twins by enabling users to visualize, query, and analyze infrastructure digital twins in their full context, at any level of granularity, at any scale, all geo-coordinated and fully searchable. Predecessor products include OpenCities; iTwin Capture, for capturing, analyzing, and sharing reality data, enables users to create engineering-ready, high resolution 3D models of infrastructure assets using drone video and survey imagery. Predecessor products include ContextCapture and Orbit3D; iTwin IoT, for acquiring and analyzing sensor data, enables users to seamlessly incorporate IoT data created by sensors and condition monitoring devices. Predecessor products include those from sensemetrics, Vista Data Vision, and eagle.io; AssetWise Linear SUPERLOAD, for automating the safe routing and permitting of overweight/oversized vehicles; AssetWise Linear Analytics, for visualizing and understanding vast quantities of linear network data to identify trends and anomalies, and optimize maintenance decisions, for rail or road networks; AssetWise Inspections, for performing inspections of bridges and related assets; OpenUtilities, for the design and management of electric, gas, and district energy networks, and substations; OpenTower, for the design of communications towers, including for 5G capacity; OpenWindPower, for the design of fixed and floating wind turbine structures; Power Line (PLS) applications, for design of overhead electric power transmission, distribution, and communication lines and their structures; SPIDA, for modeling and analysis of overhead electric distribution network systems; PlantSight, a digital twin solution for operating industrial plants; and WaterSight, a digital twin solution for water and wastewater networks. iTwin Platform The company’s iTwin Platform for infrastructure digital twins enables Bentley Systems and other third-party developers to build applications and solutions for a wide range of potential digital twin use cases. The company has used this platform to create cloud services which complement and extend project delivery systems and asset performance systems offerings, to create fit-for-purpose industry digital twin solutions, and to support an emerging ecosystem of third-party developers. This platform powers the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud and its constituent solutions, which are unified and made interoperable by Bentley Systems’ incorporated infrastructure schemas. The next priority for the iTwin Platform is to improve the company’s modelling and simulation applications by incorporating the simultaneous creation of iModels along with existing deliverable files. The company expects that users of such applications will accordingly gain new data-centric benefits to make their projects more efficient, more connected, and the results more valuable than before. Rather than disrupting the company’s users’ existing workflows, the company expects that this will be accomplished by seamlessly augmenting their current tools, file formats, and deliverables. Commercial Offerings Licensing Models The company’s applications are offered through perpetual licenses or term licenses, priced dependent on the country of purchase and use. Most accounts owning perpetual licenses subscribe to the company’s SELECT coverage which, in addition to providing support and upgrades, enables the use of their licenses for each product to be pooled within each country. The company’s ProjectWise and AssetWise Enterprise Systems are offered under the company’s cloud services subscription program, charged quarterly based on actual users of ‘visas’ for various levels of functionality. Commercial models eligible for the company’s Cloud Services Subscription (‘CSS’), such as the company’s E365 subscription, entail an annual funding commitment, generally paid upfront, based on an estimation of services to be used for the upcoming year. Actual consumption is monitored and invoiced against the deposit on a calendar quarter basis. Accounts are charged only for what gets used, and deposited amounts never expire. User Success The company reorganized its activities focused on substantive support for existing users and their accounts into the company’s User Success group, consisting of over 600 colleagues, most with domain experience and credentials in infrastructure engineering. User Success has enabled the company to transition from traditional paradigms of on-demand technical support, and episodically contracted professional services, to instead delivering proactive and continuous engagement with users and accounts through ‘Success Plans.’ Success Plans are designed with the company’s accounts’ business outcomes in mind ensuring that users and accounts maximize the value achieved from the company’s solutions. Working collaboratively with the company’s accounts, User Success Specialists deliver Success Plans through structured engagements based on explicit and standardized ‘Success Blueprints’ that include annual planning, virtual or in-person engagements with subject matter experts, and quarterly business reviews. Typically, the company’s User Success colleagues engage with the company’s accounts remotely. Success Plans, based on allotted credits toward multiple Success Blueprints per calendar quarter, are bundled into the company’s E365 commercial program, which has grown rapidly among the company’s larger accounts. Accounts The company provides its software solutions to over 40,000 accounts in 194 countries worldwide. Acquisitions The company’s platform acquisitions have been: Power Line Systems (2022), to bring design, analysis, and management of overhead electric power transmission lines and structures to the company’s grid digital twin solutions. Power Line Systems substantially completes the reach of the company’s comprehensive portfolio for the lifecycle integration of grid infrastructure across electrical transmission, substation, and distribution assets, and communications towers. Adina R&D (2022), adds nonlinear simulation capabilities to users of the company’s comprehensive modeling and simulation software portfolio for infrastructure engineering, Vetasi (2022), acquired through Cohesive, adds the largest IBM Maximo and enterprise asset management system consultancy team across Europe, Africa, and ASEAN countries, with headquarters in the United Kingdom and operations based in Poland, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, Ukraine, and Australia. Sales and Marketing The company’s direct sales channel includes: Account Managers, who are responsible for the company’s largest accounts. For pre-sales technical activities, Account Managers are supported by the engineering domain experts within the company’s User Success organization. The company’s Virtuosity inside sales colleagues and global ecommerce platform, which serves primarily its smaller- to medium-sized prospects and accounts, incorporating the company’s Success Force technical experts who help to sell to and advise users across the company’s account base. The company relies on specialist channel partners in geographic regions where the company does not have a meaningful presence or where, for some of the company’s offerings, direct sales efforts are less economically feasible. The company’s ProjectWise and AssetWise Enterprise Systems offerings are generally sold through either proactive proposals or responses to requests for proposal, so sales cycles for those offerings range from months to several quarters. The company has a comprehensive global proposals team to assure appropriate business development resources are allocated, to quality-assure efficient and effective proposal contents, and to maximize the capture ratio for the company’s proposal pursuit. Research and Development For the year ended December 31, 2022, the company’s research and development spending was $257.9 million. Intellectual Property As of December 31, 2022, the company had 143 patents granted and 61 patents pending in the U.S., the first of which expires on January 3, 2023, and 27 patents granted and 59 patents pending internationally, the first of which expires on September 9, 2023. In 2022, the company’s patent committee reviewed 26 invention disclosures submitted by the company’s software developers, and filed 26 U.S. and two foreign patent applications, while 17 U.S. and four foreign patents were granted. The company has registered 167 trademarks, including ‘Bentley,’ ‘MicroStation,’ ‘AssetWise,’ and ‘ProjectWise,’ with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in several jurisdictions outside the U.S. The company partnered with Building 21, a school district of Philadelphia public high school, to pilot a paid summer internship for interested students. The company is also a supporter of the American Heart Association’s STEM for Red campaign, bringing STEM education and career advice to female students in the Philadelphia School District. In addition, the company continues to partner with HBCUs to provide mentoring and engineering programs for college students. The company enhanced its partnerships with diverse professional organizations, such as the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials (COMTO) and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) to advance equitable opportunities for underrepresented groups in the transportation and engineering industries. Competition The company’s key competitors in public works/utilities applications include Autodesk, Inc., Trimble Inc., and Hexagon AB. The company’s key competitors in industrial applications include Hexagon AB, the AVEVA unit of Schneider Electric, and Dassault Systèmes. The company’s key competitors in resources applications include Hexagon AB, the AVEVA unit of Schneider Electric, and Dassault Systèmes. The company’s key competitors in commercial/facilities applications include Autodesk, Inc., Nemetschek SE, and Trimble Inc. The company’s key competitors in project delivery systems include Autodesk, Inc. and Oracle Corporation. The company’s key competitors in asset performance systems include Aspen Technology, Inc., the AVEVA unit of Schneider Electric, Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., and General Electric Corp. History Bentley Systems, Incorporated was founded in 1984. The company was incorporated in California in 1984.