“The infrastructure community is facing the relentless pressures of a difficult economy”

Bentley has introduced the ‘Be Employable’ initiative. Can you explain what it is designed to accomplish?

Malcolm Walter: Worldwide, the infrastructure community is facing the relentless pressures of a diffi cult economy, and the downsizing of design and engineering organizations has become widespread. Bentley’s mission of ‘sustaining infrastructure’ encompasses the need to ‘sustain the professions’ that design, build, and operate our infrastructure, and the Be Employable program is dedicated to doing just that.

Be Employable is an innovative addition to Bentley’s Be Careers Network, which is our program for academic institutions dedicated to helping students graduate with market-ready technology skills. Be Employable helps outplaced architectural, engineering, construction, and geospatial professionals update and upgrade their technology skill sets, giving them a signifi cant competitive edge in today’s challenging job market. The Be Employable initiative provides free access to Bentley’s comprehensive software portfolio and training as well as the ability to earn learning units from the Bentley Institute, Bentley’s training organization.

By taking advantage of these offerings, Be Employable participants will be better positioned as top candidates for employment opportunities across a broad spectrum of projects. Moreover, once back in the workforce, these infrastructure professionals will be able to deliver greater value to their new employers.

We conceived our Be Employable initiative to help transitioning infrastructure professionals overcome these challenges by giving them the opportunity to advance their software know-how for advantage in the job market. To extend its reach we will encourage downsizing user organizations to make outgoing colleagues aware of the Be Employable opportunity.

The economic slowdown this year is an opportunity to innovate and experiment. Please comment?

Christopher Liew: India, like the rest of the world, has been negatively impacted by the global economic downturn. At the same time, infrastructure development is a bright spot in terms of the world economy. Improving and building infrastructure has a tremendous economic return, especially when accompanied by the type of digital infrastructure information modeling provided by Bentley software. Armed with these tools, India can go very far in its infrastructure development and in sustaining its economy.

In alignment with this strategy, we enthusiastically look forward to growing the use in India of Bentley’s comprehensive V8i software portfolio for infrastructure. Launched in Q4 2008, V8i leverages and extends core capabilities of its new interoperability platform to provide the breadth and depth of technology needed for fully integrated project delivery.

Another innovation that we launched in 2009 is our Be Connected online seminar series, which this year takes the place of our annual user event called Be Conference. Be Connected gives architects, engineers, builders, geospatial professionals, and owneroperators a chance to learn about applying information modeling from some of the world’s leading infrastructure practitioners – free of charge, in both live and OnDemand formats.

You have an ‘innovative subscription program’ for licensing your software. Would you like to explain it?

MW: To help facilitate investment in the software needed to effi ciently design, build, and operate infrastructure, Bentley offers our users easy, costeffective access to our solutions and products through our subscription programs. Among these programs are Bentley SELECT and our Enterprise Licensing Subscription (ELS).

With a SELECT subscription, software licenses are deployed from SELECTserver, which allows subscribers to access shared licenses or take advantage of mobile, sitebased or home-use licenses. Licenses are accessible via a server, and any user can be granted access regardless of the number of users working at the same time. To streamline software costs for subscribers, SELECTserver uses innovative reporting technology to capture the license usage on each desktop. Users then only pay a fi xed annual fee per license.

Our ELS helps large, multi-offi ce and global organizations gain signifi cant operational and competitive advantage, reduce annual software costs, and enjoy unrestricted access to a comprehensive software and learning portfolio – all for a single annual fee. An ELS provides unlimited access to more than 200 software products for GIS, design, analysis, and collaboration. ELS subscribers pay only for the software licenses they use.

In addition to these innovative and popular programs, Bentley offers a Bentley LEARN training subscription, which provides organization-wide learning for a fi xed annual fee. It eliminates training-related travel time and cost, reduces scheduling headaches, and helps organizations create a culture of continuous learning to gain a competitive advantage and maximize the return on investment for their training and software.

What is the latest offering from Bentley for infrastructure professionals?

MW: As mentioned, Bentley’s V8i software portfolio leverages and extends core capabilities of its new interoperability platform to provide the breadth and depth of technology needed for fully integrated project delivery – and all of the workfl ow improvements, reduced project costs, and shortened delivery times associated with this innovative approach.

Using V8i’s intuitive design modeling tools, project teams can easily take designs from concept to completion in the same software environment. Conceptual design tools make it easier to intuitively sculpt solids and surfaces and GenerativeComponents makes it easy to iterate through design alternatives. Together, these design modeling tools help teams increase design productivity, improve information quality, and reduce project rework.

With interactive dynamic views, MicroStation V8i leapfrogs competing software by enabling users to work in 2D or 3D views and see both update dynamically. With interactive dynamic views, users can save time coordinating plan sets, improve the quality of deliverables, and simplify the 3D modeling experience.

Additionally, the Luxology rendering engine, now built right into MicroStation and all MicroStationbased products, allows users to eliminate translations between model creation and visualization environments, enjoy seamless transition for design modeling and visualization to workfl ows, and spend more time creating designs and less time reworking them.

Moreover, with Delta File Transfer (DFT), V8i solves the “big fi le” problem that has traditionally slowed productivity across distributed project teams. By transferring only the changes to fi les, rather than the entire fi le, ProjectWise V8i becomes the “killer app” for project team collaboration.

With the Future Cities India 2020 competition you have forayed into the Indian education scenario. What are your plans to take this ‘training/ learning’ exercise further?

CL: Future Cities India 2020 was inspired by the U.S.-based National Engineers Week Future City Competition, which reaches 30,000 students annually. Bentley sponsors the Future City Competition and also serves as chair of its Leadership Council.

In October 2006, our CEO, Greg Bentley, met with Shri. Kapil Sibal, the Honorable Minister for Science & Technology & Earth Sciences. Minister Sibal is a great supporter of the initiative, and he provided us with a vision that we then worked jointly with the Ministry of Science and Technology to defi ne. The results are three successful Future Cities India 2020 competitions.

Bentley is also addressing the need to foster the next generation of engineering professionals in all infrastructure disciplines through its Be Careers Network. Its mission is to help students graduate with marketready technology skills. Bentley’s collaboration with the Ministry of Science & Technology to engage more students from India in the fi eld of infrastructure and enhance their skills through Future Cities India 2020 is a Be Careers Network initiative. In addition to training India’s young minds, Bentley also recognizes that growing the skills and education of engineering teams is of paramount importance to the infrastructure community. That’s the focus of the Bentley Institute, which offers virtually unlimited blended learning, including instructor-led distance learning and a full complement of OnDemand eLearning.

How do you see India as a market for Bentley products?

CL: Infrastructure practitioners in India use Bentley solutions and products to help design, build and operate infrastructure. A quick look at Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure 2008 project yearbook of Be Award nominees reveals a host of projects in this region that have relied on Bentley’s comprehensive portfolio to save time and money, enhance project quality, increase collaboration, improve workfl ows, and increase productivity and profi tability.

These projects represent many of the solution communities served by Bentley, including roads, bridges, rail and transit, campuses, factories, buildings, power generation, mining and metals, oil and gas, water and wastewater, electric and gas utilities, communications, and cadastre and land development.

Among the many organizations in India benefi ting from the innovative features of Bentley software is Scott Wilson India Pvt Ltd. This organization used Bentley MXROAD and STAAD. Pro extensively during the detailed design process to optimize outputs in preparing the Detailed Project Reports (DPR) for 1,447 kilometers of Phase IA road of Kanataka state highways improvement project-II. The project consisted of 443 bridges, 2,623 culverts, and six railway crossings. It was completed six months ahead of schedule and saved Rs. 166 crore. Another user of Bentley software in India is Bechtel Corporation.

Bechtel employed ProjectWise, Bentley’s collaboration system, on the massive $7.5 billion Jamnagar Refi nery project. Using ProjectWise, Bechtel connected a 3,000-member project team located in 10 offi ces spread across three continents. It also used ProjectWise to manage its engineering CAD fi les and more than 50,000 drawings, which helped improve quality, reduce rework, and meet project deadlines.

One fi nal example among the long and growing list of Bentley software users in India is Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran, a major utility that supplies potable water to residents of Maharashtra.

Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran used Bentley’s WaterGEMS to design a hydraulic model of existing and proposed pipelines when the water supply source for Badlapur was severely damaged in 2005. The software helped transform an intermittent water supply to a 24-by-7 system, which reduced nonrevenue water loss by 427 million liters a year, producing considerable cost savings.