Bentley Highlights Key Trends in Process Plant Creation.

Key Developments Shared at Reception for Engineering News-Record Top Firms Attending daratechPLANT2008

HOUSTON -- At a reception sponsored by Bentley Systems, Incorporated, held to congratulate the Engineering News-Record (ENR) Top Firms in attendance at the daratechPLANT2008 conference, CEO Greg Bentley identified key market trends in process plant creation, and provided an update on the company's initiatives to help market participants stay ahead of growing workloads and backlog. Joining in extending congratulations was Jay McGraw, group publisher, McGraw-Hill Construction, which publishes ENR.

Underscoring Bentley's priority of configuring its software offerings to better serve the increasingly distributed "enterprises" that come together for each plant creation project, Mr. Bentley pointed out that every owner-operator and engineering/procurement/construction (EPC) firm attending daratechPLANT2008 now utilizes Bentley software. "On average, there's more than 20 'Bentley sites' globally per firm," said Mr. Bentley. "To manage project information across these distributed enterprises, fully 42 of the ENR Top 50 Design Firms have now adopted Bentley's ProjectWise collaboration servers."

He continued, "To facilitate technology adoption across growing and increasingly distributed enterprises, Bentley's innovative Enterprise License Subscription (ELS), introduced in 2004, is becoming the commercial model of choice for participants in the plant vertical."

Bentley's ELS entitles a subscribing organization to unlimited use of Bentley's market-leading comprehensive software portfolio at an annual fixed fee, reset annually based on trailing-year usage. Bentley added a record 23 new ELS subscriber organizations among plant participants during 2007, to reach 62 cumulatively. New plant ELS subscribers being announced at daratechPLANT2008 include Aibel Group, Burns & McDonnell, Linde Group, NLI Engineering, NNE Pharmaplan, and TyumenNIIgiprogas. Said Mr. Bentley, "Already, over a third of user organizations attending daratechPLANT2008 have become ELS subscribers. ELS resets for all plant subscribers during 2007 reflected 27 percent growth in Bentley software utilization."

Daratech's annual rankings of software vendors, released at the conference, confirmed Bentley's continued No. 1 position in software for process plant owner-operators. Mr. Bentley observed that the company's distinguishing initiatives to support reuse of design models and handover data throughout the lifecycle of operating plants are increasingly fruitful for its users and for Bentley. Its ProjectWise Lifecycle Server now is responsible for managing engineering information for over $50 billion of commissioned plant assets. At the reception, Bentley recognized BP as a "Top Owner" for implementing - as presented by BP at the conference - its 10th major capital facility, across three continents, with plant engineering data managed for the lifecycle through ProjectWise Lifecycle Server.

Daratech also ranked Bentley again No. 1 among software platforms for plant creation, and again No. 1 in software for conceptual plant creation. Mr. Bentley announced that - in addition to acquisitions announced earlier this month, which included Hevacomp, leader in building services and energy analysis software, and LEAP, leader in software for concrete bridges - Bentley has substantially completed the scope of its conceptual design offerings through the acquisition of ECT's promis*e software, the leader in electrical control systems.

promis*e incorporates a content repository of more than 2 million up-to-date parts, maintained in conjunction with leading equipment vendors. Mr. Bentley pointed out that such partnerships position Bentley to add significant new value to emerging plant creation best practices, spawned of necessity by growing backlogs.

He explained that rather than procuring merely "engineered commodities," EPC workflows increasingly rely upon creatively incorporating larger-scale modular "industrial solutions," leveraging suppliers' organic innovations to speed and improve project realization. Accordingly, industrial solution suppliers are assuming more of the engineering work and, in effect, also more of the construction work, as they design, configure, fabricate, and just-in-time deliver modules of greater functional scope and scale for assembly on site. By doing so, they help owner-operators and EPC firms overcome resource shortages of professionals, materials, and crafts.

"The bidirectional and interactive exchange of virtual work packages to support this necessary and inevitable 'industrialization' puts a premium on interoperability between engineering deliverables, beyond the challenges of merely 'offshoring' project work," Mr. Bentley said. "While there may once have been a case for 'command and control' plant creation systems premised on enforcing a monolithic software environment across a project, today's work distribution realities instead make 'connect and collaborate' interoperations essential, between globally and industrially dispersed project contributors whose software environments can't be presumed or constrained."

Fortunately for the plant industry, owner-operator consortia have been at work developing a uniquely robust plant data model, and achieving for it international standard status as ISO 15926, for the representation of process plant lifecycle information. "Though perhaps conceived primarily to span data generations over the decades of life of a plant," said Mr. Bentley, "ISO 15926 fortuitously also solves the formidable challenges of distributed plant creation enterprises. By way of further serendipity, computing environments, driven by 'internetworking,' now efficiently support services-oriented architectures to take full advantage of self-describing data, the hallmark of ISO 15926."

For Bentley, the realization of the breakthrough potential of ISO 15926 was also fortuitous, starting with its adoption for ProjectWise Lifecycle Server, which needed to cater for plant data created in design systems other than Bentley's own. Based on that "interoperability" success, ISO 15926 was next harnessed to enable real-time "intra-operations" between plant applications, including continued new acquisitions, within the company's comprehensive portfolio.

In concluding, Mr. Bentley said, "The culmination of this work with ISO 15926 - Bentley's industry-first OpenPlant applications, so designated to signify data persisted in the ISO 15926 data model - coincides with plant creators' interoperations imperatives, as 'Open Minds think OpenPlant!'"

About Bentley

Bentley Systems, Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle of the world's infrastructure. The company's comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2,400 colleagues globally, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top Design Firms and major owner-operators, and was named the world's No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a Daratech research study.

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Bentley, the "B" Bentley logo, OpenPlant, Enterprise License Subscription, ProjectWise, ProjectWise Lifecycle Server, Hevacomp, LEAP, and promis*e, are either registered or unregistered trademarks or service marks of Bentley Systems, Incorporated or one of its direct or indirect wholly-owned subsidiaries. All other brands and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.