Bentley extends ProjectWise adoption

Bentley Systems’ Year in Infrastructure conference (#YII2015) has seen a host of product and corporate announcements, with an enterprise deal with AECOM involving ProjectWise a headline item.

London: 3pm GMT – CEO Greg Bentley opened today’s press conference with a brief mention of the US company’s declared intention (July 2015) to float on the stock exchange, but quickly dampened speculation by saying that Wall Street sentiment towards IPOs had chilled in recent months. Instead, therefore, he focused on the company’s acquisitions over the past year – including that of EADOC in March 2015 (see also April 2015 post: Law expands on Bentley’s EADOC deal) – and then a series of recent announcements.

ProjectWise CONNECT Edition now generally available

Bentley highlights ProjectWise’s extensive adoption in the infrastructure sector – its 2014 Annual Report (tabled at the conference) shows 45 of Engineering News Record‘s top 50 design firms are ProjectWise subscribers (and 283 out of the top 641 design firms). Historically, this has been mainly delivered as an in-house, on-premise hosted service, though ProjectWise Essentials, a SaaS option for smaller businesses with insufficient in-house IT resources, was launched a year ago (post).

Now, with ProjectWise CONNECT Edition, this “workhorse for work sharing”, “the ‘gold standard’ for AECO collaboration worldwide” (Bentley’s words) is now available to the entire supply chain, taking advantage of Bentley’s Microsoft partnership using the Azure cloud-computing platform. Senior Vice President Bhupinder Singh highlighted the company’s cloud services as core to the triple challenges of increasing complexity of devices, software and data.

The YII2015 conference also has an awards programme, and two finalists presenting tomorrow are international companies seeking to deploy ProjectWise to, respectively, enable collaboration across their enterprise (AECOM) and develop consistent approaches to building information modelling (Arup).

AECOM enterprise deal

The conference has also coincided with an announcement that AECOM, which has named Bentley as a strategic partner for project delivery technologies, has extended its ProjectWise corporate commitment to fully include the new Bentley Cloud Services Subscription Program.

AECOM is a longstanding user of ProjectWise. As a finalist in the “Innovation in Project Delivery” category it has documented 80 percent savings in project startup from the capabilities offered by Bentley’s Cloud Services Subscription Program. Some 20,000 AECOM employees already use ProjectHub, a hybrid ProjectWise system developed in-house at AECOM, which uses seven identical “hubs” placed globally, allowing users to access the system from anywhere in the world and have a consistent experience across projects and geographies.

I will be learning more about both AECOM ProjectWise programme and Arup’s ProjectWise BIM project template in their finalist presentations tomorrow (Tuesday). EADOC is also featured in a finalist presentation relating to HDR’s Los Osos wastewater project in California.

[Disclosure: I am attending the Bentley Year in Infrastructure conference as a guest of Bentley Systems, who have paid my hotel expenses. I am also a juror in the BE Inspired Awards.]