The geospatial community is so diverse that it is difficult to answer this question. Of course, geospatial technology in consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones, will increase as the democratisation of geospatial technology begun by Google Earth and the satellitenavigation device vendors continues. Soon it will be as common to search for spatial information as it is to search for information using Google. Nearly everything we do has a location- based aspect to it, and geospatial technology will unlock all sorts of opportunity to those involved in this area. And, while traditional GIS continues to be identifiable in some application areas, in the infrastructure world, the divide between CAD and GIS continues to evaporate. EPCs and owner-operators involved in meeting the challenges of delivering new infrastructure of the 21st century do not have the will or the patience to deal with data silos and proprietary databases. They want openness, integration and seamless workflows across distributed enterprises. It is in this context that we have been following a strategy of making geospatial technology available seamlessly within engineering workflows. Geospatial technology has always been important to us. It is becoming pervasive in all of our applications – notable, in our GEOPAK, InRoads and MX civil design products. We are also seeing increased demand for Bentley Geospatial Server, which gives enterprise access to engineering designs through open geospatial databases such as Oracle Spatial and also to legacy GIS datastores. We will continue its strategy of “advancing GIS for infrastructure.” There is evident emphasis laid on sustainability of our society, our environment, and our profession by Bentley. How do your products embody these ideals? Long-term relationships are what our business strategies are about, and our users work on long-term projects that include sustainability as a major component. An example is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, one of our largest users with whom we have had one of our longeststanding relationships. In the case of building energy performance, the Corps has been the leader in the U.S. federal government for using building information modelling to make better-performing assets. In accomplishing its civil mission, protecting waterways and ports in the United States, the Corps has become fully committed to information modelling and this commitment is among its highest priorities. In that respect as well, the Corps has done a fantastic job of ensuring the meeting of sustainability and environmental concerns. The fish ladder project presented at the “Be Inspired Symposium” this year – to protect the spawning route of salmon in the northwestern United States – is one example where the Corps has ensured that the generation of hydroelectric power does not come at the cost of aquatic life. There’s no single answer to the question. We’re all here on the Earth for the long term and sustainability shouldn’t be regarded as a push for one or two years. It involves working smarter and making better decisions for better-performing infrastructure. Every day, our software developers help improve the capability for better decisions to be made that result in better-performing infrastructure assets, having a positive impact on all the dimensions of sustainability. The Be Inspired Best Practices Symposium and Awards brings out the best use of your line of products. What are the demands placed on your products by such innovative use? All of us at Bentley are eager to be inspired by our users’ aspirations and “trying the untried” is something we strongly encourage. Towards that end, we provide extraordinary support for extraordinary requirements. We firmly believe software is best supplied as a service and recognise that our software isn’t valuable for what it is, but rather for what it does – for the value it creates for our users and their projects. Technical support is an important part of our offerings. Keith Bentley, our founder, has always said that everyone at Bentley Systems is “in support” of our users’ projects. We maintain a priority list daily for user organisations that are having project challenges, or that are trying things they haven’t tried before and need special assistance. I review this list every week. We also have a higher-status level that we assign to projects that are falling behind schedule. And I review these every day. As I said, we encourage our users to lead the way in applying our software against new requirements that stretch its capabilities. We have a priority support team within our Professional Services that addresses these types of innovative requirements. That said we are a software company not a professional services company. But while Professional Services makes up only 10% or a little bit more of our revenue, it is an important 10%. The group includes 500 to 600 of our colleagues around the world, and they are among the very best available anywhere. They are a real asset because, on the one hand, they help cross-fertilise our users’ ideas into our product roadmaps, and on the other hand they serve to propagate best practices across our user community. As a result, they often are key contributors in the innovative projects we have speaking of, in which users attempt the untried. One example is the Crossrail Tunnel project in London, which, at $25 billion, is the largest construction project in Europe. It is not merely a civil engineering project; much of the work involves underground stations, signalling and electrical and building services that are all being done using a complete information modelling approach. It uses virtually every product in our comprehensive V8i portfolio of software that we introduced in November 2008. V8i allows each of our product to progress in a compatible way, just-in-time, and largely driven by the requirements of a given project. We will not only be providing the information modelling software, but also helping in its implementation throughout the project. We are pleased to make sure that an untried, innovative application of our software will work, especially when it involves integration and intra-operability across our portfolio. We are pleased that our users aspire to push the limits of our innovations. We encourage each project’s success, and we help ensure it with our Professional Services team. I think that makes a difference. What do you expect from the user/doer community in geospatial, both in the US and globally? The focus on engineering projects tends to mean that our primary users are, in fact, the world’s ‘doers’, in terms of infrastructure and environmental improvements. They are responding to an increasing emphasis on ‘integrated projects’ catalysed by markets where public/private partnerships are leading the way. Information modelling is recognised as the key to more intelligent infrastructure decisions and results, transcending outdated institutional divisions between, for instance, ‘GIS’, ‘CAD’ and ‘asset management’ workflows, respectively. I expect best practices for integrated projects to take full advantage of information modelling across the infrastructure lifecycle, as economic priorities appropriately turn from ‘stimulus’ to ‘sustaining’! What is the role that we (GIS Development) can play in making the geospatial community Citius, Altius, Fortius? GIS Development needs to continue the good work it has done over the last several years as an advocate for and reporter of the crucially important role that geospatial technology plays in the world. As the market for this technology evolves, GIS Development will no doubt have to focus more resources on understanding the growing application of this technology in commercial, investorowned organisations, and separately it will need to decide how far it wants to cover the diffusion of geospatial technology in the consumer arena. GIS technology is less and less driven by the academic and government worlds, and is increasingly driven by commercial organisations and their constituents. Thanks in advance to GIS Development for continuing to illuminate this path forward! On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the company, are any specific initiatives being planned? As it was in our first 25th years, our sole mission for the next 25 years and beyond will be Sustaining Infrastructure – through our contributions to the indispensable value creation that infrastructure professionals and organisations around the globe accomplish. |
