Yesterday’s keynote at the Be Inspired Conference held at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam featured an introduction by COO Malcolm Walters, followed by a keynote by Bentley CEO Greg Bentley.

In attendance were 84 journalists from around the world, whom Walters said reached 3 ½ million readers.

Greg Bentley’s talk was entitled “Working Smarter, Together, and Accelerating Mobility for Data Acquisition.” He talked about how good infrastructure design sustains our economy and reduces our environmental footprint.

Consumerization

A new word was introduced:  “Consumerization,” or, the measure of how much invention is coming our way.  “The products we’re talking about are industrial,” said Bentley. “We don’t have to invent these technologies – we just have to apply them.”

Consumerization refers to a short cycle for products, economical and accessible everywhere.  It is really the first time we have heard Bentley Systems talk about the consumer market, except for the way the mobile market has broadened technology in its aim toward the consumer.

The Bentley Utilization Index shows growth in various industry segments. Asia continues to be a growth area for infrastructure. 2012 has shown reasonable growth widely and unevenly distributed throughout the world, according to Bentley.  47% of application utilization hours are BIM hours.

In a recent report by McGraw Hill, it was determined that there is the expectation in AEC firms that projects will be done in BIM in 2013. Those surveyed believe that ROI in BIM use depends upon the expertise level of those using it.

Bentley introduced the idea of industrial apps from Bentley that will be able to handle huge projects specifically. This takes the form of a ProjectWise or AssetWise passport on any device and gives access to all Bentley apps.

The concept of information mobility (where the information keeps working), vs. information mortality (where information gets stuck where it is and doesn’t get used properly; it is comprised of monolithic data structure, conflicting file formats, opaque information, and enterprise labyrinths) clarifies what can happen to  information that has been housed in building information systems and other information systems.

Information mobility was a phrase used throughout the day.

Information Modeling Innovations

Senior vice president of Bentley Software Bhupinder Singh spoke next on Information Modeling innovations. “Since 2009 we have been delivering compatibility updates through the V8i SELECT Series,” he said. “We are most interested in ease of use from the workflow standpoint, how easy is a product to implement in workflow.”

Ways in which this can be accomplished are through ProjectWise, according to Singh, where ProjectWise can contribute to knowledge sharing and view sharing such as spatial view, dependency view and component view.

There are concerns that the right version be used with mobile devices, when we have several different clouds offered, for example. Leaving ProjectWise behind a firewall can exclude someone outside the firewall who needs to access information.

Bentley CONNECT is designed to reach the consumers outside the firewall and enterprises that would like to share their data through a neutral space. An SAAS environment provides Bentley Connections Space that up until now has been serviced with DropBox.

Integrated Project Innovations

Singh talked about “Integrated Project Innovations” such as “Dynamic Review”  that translates to Bentley Transmittal Services that are built on ProjectWise transmittals. This also includes ProjectWise integration for Revit 2013, ProjectWise integration for Civil 3D 2013, and the new Project Dashboards to be available next year, enabling users to create their own dashboards. With this dashboard users will be able to use industry standards and i-models.

The Bentley product ConstructSim heavily leverages i-models as it is a model -based work package creation. The visualization engine in ConstructSim is Navigator.

For mobile devices Information mobility apps the heavy lifting will take place on a server.

Virtual Word vs. Physical World

Greg Bentley described the “physical world” as that of budgeting systems and scheduling. This is an area that also spans from graphics and engineering data.

The “virtual world” holds things like virtual positioning for ProjectWise, taking advantage of the sensor technology brought into Bentley by companies such as Ivara and Trimble, a picture that will fill out more as this conferences progresses.