Selected AEC News Headlines for Q1 2001

Several new developments occurred in the first quarter of the new millennium. Below are the Editor's Picks from among the press releases we have published in the Café News at AECCafé.com. All have been edited for clarity and brevity. My own comments are in bold italics.

Article Index

Bentley and Intergraph Complete $40 Million Acquisition

January 2 – Intergraph Corporation and Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced the completion of Bentley's acquisition of Intergraph's civil engineering, plot-services and raster-conversion software businesses, which represent about $30 million of annual revenue.

The acquired Intergraph products are integral to Bentley's strategy for empowering the burgeoning E/C/O IT marketplace:

• The plotserver products include the market leader, InterPlot, and the new Digital Print Room line, which supports online digital plotset dissemination and content-based queries, essential to E/C/O e-business. InterPlot and Digital Print Room servers are fundamental to Bentley's Viecon initiatives for engineering information management.
• The raster-conversion products facilitate the creation of editable digital representations of hardcopy engineering drawings. These products include I/RAS Engineer and I/RAS B, the market-share leader, which join Bentley's MicroStation ReproGraphics for these functions. Through I/RAS technologies and aecXML, the now broadly adopted interchange strategy of the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI), existing drawings and plotsets can be intelligently coded for Web-enabled content management of engineering data.
• The acquired civil products, with MicroStation and the products of Bentley's Strategic Affiliate GEOPAK Corporation, provide the engineering foundation for virtually all of the transportation infrastructure in North America. In addition to the InRoads and InRail products, the acquired applications address civil engineering requirements for construction, site, survey, bridge, storm and sanitary.

We spoke with Jean-Baptiste Monnier, PhD. , Senior Vice President, Solutions, Bentley Systems, Inc., and asked him which areas the new civil products encompass that are not already being addressed by GEOPAK.

"The InRoads and Civil SelectCAD line of acquired products and the GEOPAK line (owned by GEOPAK Corp., a Bentley Strategic Affiliate) will be developed, each in its own right," he replied. "There are, however, unique technologies in the acquired line that we plan to promote widely.

"The first one is InRail. InRail is a unique solution, it has been very successful in Europe, and it is well-positioned to take advantage of the worldwide rail infrastructure investments being made, both in the high-speed rail and in urban transit systems.

"The other one is the AutoCAD support. SelectCAD was developed to run on both MicroStation and AutoCAD, and this fits nicely with Bentley's dual-format support. Hybrid environments–in which both formats are in use–are a unique focus for Bentley's server-level engineering information management products such as its market-leading ProjectWise, ProjectBank and ModelServer lines."