Bentley CONNECT Kicks Off in Philadelphia Today
Greg Bentley welcomed a full auditorium of attendees to kick-off of the company’s CONNECT series of events that will visit more than 20 cities around the world over the coming months. The venue this morning was the Franklin Institute, which contains the city’s science and technology museum. It proved a fitting setting for both a look back at the evolution of Bentley’s technology as well as a look forward to where their design and engineering software is headed.
The CONNECT Edition of Bentley’s software is the next-generation following their V8i release, and it supports a hybrid computing environment using Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment that connects across desktop modeling applications, on-premise servers, and mobile apps.
The theme for this software release is “Advancing Project Delivery” with the ongoing sub-theme of “Information Mobility.” ProjectWise, the firm’s means for integrating project information continues to gain acceptance. Analysis and simulation continue to be a focus of the company, with products that go beyond just the model to simulate and inform how the design will perform in water, structural steel, plant, offshore platforms, and more. The company has most recently extended their offerings to include MANAGEservices, a means to add software functionality for project work, hosted on the cloud.
With the addition of Pointools and Acute3D over the past few years, they have added 3D data capture with lasers or point clouds and workflows for high-resolution representations. The move away from specialized surveying tools and workflows for reality capture continues with our ability to model with photos, laser scans, and even data capture with unmanned aircraft systems.
The company is also extending their reach into asset management with their AssetWise and acquisition of Amulet to help port the modeling and analytical tools toward operations. Amulet connects sensors and analytics for operations forecasts. An example was presented for a desalination plant in Australia that tied together weather, a hydrodynamic model coupled with customer demand data to optimize their water distribution.
The company announced a new CONNECTED Partner program to connect to partner software. This includes a link to LumenRT visualization software to enhance realistic visualizations with realistic water, vegetation, weather and day or night visualizations as well as populating projects with people and street furniture modeling. Another partner is Roussey for modeling and construction of electrical distribution networks.
The company is focused on the complete project workflows that are enhanced with dashboards, standards implementations and catalogs of designed components to ease design, engineering and construction.
The Navigator Connect Edition is an application across tablets and smartphones as an easy first step toward movement to Bentley’s new Connect editions, as it allows a common visualization and data sharing environment. The upgrade path would then move on to MicroStation CE and ProjectWise CE to gain access to all of these next-generation advancements.
For details on other CONNECT events, visit: http://connection.bentley.com/
