Greg Bentley: Point clouds will be ‘in equal standing with geometrical models’
EXTON, Pa. – Though a privately held company, Bentley Systems holds an annual conference call with investors, analysts and the press where it provides certain financial performance information. Company CEO Greg Bentley took this opportunity on Tuesday to exude confidence and optimism.
Announcing 10 percent YoY revenue growth, to $523 million, Bentley said, “2012 has already started stronger than did either of 2009 or 2010.” Highlighting the company’s software subscription revenue model, which makes up 72 percent of the company’s turnover, he said utilization of licenses by the AEC and infrastructure communities is “now above pre-recession levels overall, and especially by owner-operator accounts.”
Brands he identified as “star” performers, growing at a double-digit rate even through the downturn, include ProjectWise, Bentley Map, ProSteel, and AutoPIPE. Asia has been a particularly good market for Bentley, growing from 16 percent to 19 percent of total revenues. Last year, Bentely reported doubling revenue in China every three years; that has accelerated and the company now expects to double revenue there in two years.
As further evidence of Bentley’s strength in the market, the company also took the occasion of the annual call to announce both a $350 million credit facility put together by 11 banks globally and the acquisition of the elcoSystem line of software, which is a “fundamental component” of Bentley’s Raceway and Cable Management and Building Electrical Systems offerings, from Hannappel Software GmbH, based in Wiesbaden, Germany. Terms of that deal were not released.
Greg Bentley also made a point of mentioning the company’s history of “dozens of software acquisitions to leverage Microstation,” which, coupled with the credit facility, would seem to indicate Bentley is in an acquisitive mood for 2012. Bentley also accomplished a significant buyback of its equity over the past year, including the block of the company that was owned by Intergraph and sold to Hexagon, and “the Bentley family and colleagues” now control 92 percent of the company stock.
And speaking of acquisitions, SPAR took the opportunity of the call to ask about how the Pointools acquisition is being integrated into the company and whether Bentley’s ideas for making point clouds a “fundamental data type” are going as planned.
Greg Bentley said to look for an upgrade to ProjectWise that will allow for streaming point clouds, an idea discussed at the company’s European Be Inspired user meeting last fall, “in the next month or two.” More importantly, however, he said, “where we’re going with point clouds as a fundamental data type, you won’t look for specialized products to use [point clouds]. They’ll be in equal standing with geometric models” within all of Bentley’s products.
“You can’t keep up with users’ demands for point clouds,” Bentley said of customer demand. “But the gating factor has been the problem that you couldn’t manage them up till now. They were too big … We’ve surmounted that, and I hope to be reporting at this time next year that you can’t find where point clouds start and leave off in our solutions.”
