Bentley Systems is an infrastructure engineering software company that provides innovative software to advance the world’s infrastructure, sustaining both the global economy and the environment. The company’s industry-leading software solutions, including best-in-class digital twins on Microsoft Azure, are used by professionals and organizations of every size, across industries, in more than 170 countries for the design, construction, and operations of roads and bridges, rail and transit, water and wastewater, public works and utilities, buildings and campuses, and industrial facilities.
A virtual representation of a physical object or system, a digital twin uses real-time data and other sources to enable learning, reasoning, and dynamic recalibration and control for improved decision making.
Bentley delivers solutions for the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset, tailored to the needs of various people who will work with the asset over its lifetime: the engineers, architects, geospatial professionals, planners, contractors, fabricators, IT managers, operators, and maintenance engineers responsible for creating and managing the world’s infrastructure.
Comprising integrated applications and services built on Microsoft Azure, Bentley’s solutions are designed to ensure that information flows between workflow processes and project team members to enable interoperability and collaboration. The company enables organizations to optimize use of their data for real-time information, analytics, and business intelligence.
Bentley’s commitment to its users combines the most complete and integrated software with exceptional service and support through all day, every day access to technical support teams, a global user success and professional services organization, and continuous learning opportunities. These include product training, online seminars, and academic programs for current and future generations of infrastructure professionals.
Helping its users achieve their digital transformation and business goals, the company collaborates closely with Microsoft to develop groundbreaking solutions to empower engineers, constructors, and owner-operators to design, build, and operate infrastructure assets that are more cost-effective, resilient, and sustainable.
Ushering in the golden age of AI
Though artificial intelligence (AI) research and development has been a promising part of the technology ecosystem since the 1950s, in just the past five years there has been a rapid evolution and the emergence of megatrends that signify a golden age of AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics. Sectors including infrastructure, finance, defense, and space are already making use of sophisticated applications of these technologies.
Bentley is now driving real value for its users with AI and machine learning. Advances in hardware and processing power have enabled neural network computing. Big data, whether in the public sector or commercial, has massive storage requirements that cloud is uniquely able to accommodate. Cloud infrastructure is democratizing this technology, making it available to a broad set of stakeholders.
Applying AI and advanced analytics to solve real-world infrastructure challenges, Bentley is helping its users answer urgent questions, such as: How do we continue to deliver the service levels expected from our infrastructure in an environment of reduced government budgets, aging assets, and a workforce cycling through new generations without relevant experience and historical perspective?
By federating and aggregating data from multiple sources into a digital twin, applications can now begin to apply AI and machine learning to operate and reason across these datasets, many of which were previously locked away in silos or inscrutable formats. Addressing the challenges of infrastructure owners and the engineering ecosystem, Bentley is bringing AI to manage data in the digital twin, identifying patterns, doing predictive analytics, and isolating anomalies to solve complex problems crucial to sustaining the environment and growing economies.
Partnering with Microsoft to help customers achieve more
Bentley’s lengthy, productive, and mutually beneficial collaboration with Microsoft has been recognized with several Partner of the Year awards. The company has been a Microsoft partner since 1984. The relationship with Microsoft provides Bentley access to the full modern Azure cloud technology stack so that its product teams can continuously incorporate new capabilities and deliver domain expertise across the industries it serves.
“We've had a long-standing partnership with Microsoft,” says Jerry King, Vice President, Strategic Alliances at Bentley Systems. “We've always received great benefit from the partnership, both in terms of technical collaboration on how to best leverage the Microsoft platform and, in more recent years, in joint go-to-market and co-selling activities. We're extremely pleased to be a Microsoft partner.”
Bentley believes that its relationship with Microsoft allows it to bring its solutions forward to achieve better outcomes for its users. Microsoft technology has helped Bentley grow from a leader in computer-aided design and drafting, to modeling and geographic information systems (GIS) and IoT, and now, going beyond, to 4D digital twins.
Bentley and Microsoft are founding members of the Digital Twin Consortium, helping to advance digital twin thought leadership and showcase best practices and benefits. The company finds that Azure is an optimal platform for AI and advanced analytics. Microsoft cloud technology is ideal for bringing a variety of information sources together in a system for the structured data required by an inference engine and Bentley’s digital twin solutions. And the trust earned by Microsoft for the security and resiliency afforded by Azure is invaluable in the infrastructure environments where Bentley solutions are deployed.
Azure enables organizations of all sizes and across industry verticals to achieve their short- and long-term goals with a proven cloud infrastructure designed to help create and align business and technical strategies. With Azure AI services, organizations can build mission-critical solutions to analyze images, comprehend speech, uncover latent insights, and make predictions using data from across all their business.
Digital twins combine traditional business data insight with a comprehensive model of many different aspects of reality into a single view of information, as a transparent model of a business, driving operations, analytics, and simulation. This vision is behind Microsoft’s investments in Azure digital twins to simplify the creation of next-generation IoT-connected solutions that model the real world. It’s Bentley and Microsoft’s mission to bring together the best of their combined technologies to support a resilient and sustainable future.