Declaration of Independence

When Greg came aboard Bentley Systems to lead business development in 1991, two things were clear. “By the time I joined,” he said, “there were gushers of royalties flowing from Intergraph.” Indeed, the larger company’s revenues peaked that year at $1.2 billion. Yet that fact sat in tension with the brothers’ growing concern that Intergraph’s business model was “going the way of the dodo bird,” as Barry put it and that its leadership was expending the lion’s share of their energy “desperately trying to keep it together.”

Greg’s first priority was to learn everything he could about Bentley’s half-stake partner. “He went down to IGUG,” Barry recalled, “and came back knowing everything about Intergraph and the industry. Greg was the consummate knowledge sponge on Intergraph.” To a degree that may seem surprising in retrospect, this was also an exercise in self-discovery. The tie-up’s terms had enabled Bentley Systems to focus squarely on software development.

That division of labor had paid off handsomely, as evidenced by the growing number of engineers and computer-press product reviewers who considered MicroStation technically superior to its PC CAD competitors, including the market leader AutoCAD software. Yet leaving sales and marketing to Intergraph came at a cost. Simply put, the arrangement separated Bentley Systems from its users.

This dynamic was encapsulated in the first meeting Barry and Keith had with Intergraph chief Jim Meadlock. At one point, Meadlock observed, “You guys are pretty big in AEC, right?”

You guys are pretty big in AEC, right?

“Yeah, AEC,” Barry chimed in. “We’re big in that.” The brothers carried on with the conversation ably enough, but after the meeting ended Barry had to ask Keith about the acronym—prompting Keith to hazard a guess: “I think the E might mean Engineering.”

As Barry later reflected, “Architecture/Engineering/Construction was what we were doing—but we didn’t know it yet, so we didn’t even know what the customers did with the software. And we never really focused anywhere near enough on our customers’ businesses until Greg came along.”

When Greg started accompanying Keith and Barry to Huntsville, he took a different tack. “Jim Meadlock and Keith and Barry would talk about nothing but operating systems,” he recalled. “Meadlock was an electrical engineer and that’s what he was concerned with their technology, not what it was being used for. So, I would excuse myself and go over and be a fly on the wall in the sales meetings”

Apart from “identifying some people we would subsequently hire,” Greg developed “a way of thinking about their business that they didn’t have.” One of his conclusions was that MicroStation users fell into two broad categories—big engineering firms and owner-operators—and that their needs were subtly different. “Soon we had a better understanding of the nature of the vertical applications and the needs of these users and accounts,” he said. “But what confounded that,” he added, was Intergraph’s dogged devotion to hardware. “They didn’t want to get their hands dirty with sales of $3,000 packages when what they really wanted to sell were $30,000 workstations that had the software on it.”

Getting closer to users was imperative for Greg, who banned the word customer out of the conviction that Bentley Systems’ success hinged on acting less like a vendor and more like a collaborative partner for firms that used MicroStation to create real things in the real world. As Barry became fond of saying, “Our users don’t get paid to create lines and circles. Those are all proxies for engineering objects.” Bentley’s mission was really to help users realize complex visions in bricks, mortar, steel, and concrete. 

Since Intergraph only provided support for Unix workstations, in 1991, Bentley Systems established the Comprehensive Support Program (CSP) for PCs. It was a service Bentley could sell on its own, but, more importantly, the program finally gave the company a direct connection to users. (It also laid the groundwork for a future transition to a subscription-based business model.) Dave Dadoly, who joined Bentley Systems from Softdesk, a CAD software developer that would later be acquired by Autodesk, played a formative role in scaling up CSP. Apart from his ability to belt softballs into distant area codes for Bentley’s Eagleview League squad, Dadoly was hailed by Greg as a natural captain who “first introduced us to, and then professionalized for us, ‘sales culture’—which was much needed.” Working closely with companies that built applications for MicroStation, he also emerged as a skilled team builder.

Among Dadoly’s early recruits to the growing user-support function was Gary Cochrane, who was assigned employee number 94 when he joined Bentley Systems in 1992. (The company employed about 65 active colleagues at that point, and Cochrane took satisfaction in being one of the last to be assigned a double-digit number.) Cochrane, who came from a DuPont contractor called REO Southeast, had written a utility that could take a MicroStation file and create a list of all the pieces of steel its design specified. So, he knew the bits and bytes, which was just what Bentley Systems wanted out of “a guy who answered the phone” when users called with questions. “I knew the software, and could communicate about the software better than a lot of the programmers,” Cochrane reflected. “I still had areas where I wasn’t an expert,” he allowed, but when those came up “I would yell over the top of the cubicle wall to the guy next to me who was an expert.”

Dadoly took note, and coaxed Cochrane into going on the road as “the first traveling demo guy.” It started with a trip to Lexington, Kentucky, to see if he could make sense of a thorny issue a user was having. Cochrane couldn’t solve it on the spot, but the face-to-face meeting gave him enough of a handle on it to know who could. So, the following Saturday morning found him back in the office with Ray, emailing patches back and forth. “Ray would say, ‘Download this new app off the server and see if it solves the problem,’” Cochrane recalled. “So, I would run it through and email back: ‘No, that didn’t do it—it got worse!’ But by 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon, with his coding and my testing, we got to the bottom of it. And on Monday, he mailed the user the new code.”

“That’s the way we did it back then,” Cochrane said. “It wasn’t, ‘Wait three or four months for the next release.’ It was, ‘It’s fixed now, and Ray’s mailing you a new app.’”

Dadoly also lured Tom Anderson away from Intergraph, where Anderson had spent several years developing architecture-related applications for MicroStation. By this time, though, the Intergraph-Bentley relationship had become sufficiently strained that the brothers had entered a gentlemen’s agreement with Jim Meadlock not to poach one another’s employees. “Deep down inside, I wanted to be at the center of it,” reflected Anderson, whose interest in Bentley Systems had been galvanized by the brothers’ appearances at IGUG conferences. But due to the informal pact, “Keith told me Bentley wouldn’t be able to send an offer in writing, and I would have to take him at his word” that a job would be waiting. The stakes were daunting. Nearly four years removed from the practice of architecture, Anderson knew another job in software would bring him to a professional “point of no return.” He and his wife had also just started a family; their children were two-and-a-half and six months old. With his family’s livelihood in the balance, “I had to consider the move, professionally and geographically, based on Keith’s promise alone.”

Anderson gave notice to Intergraph on April 2, 1993, deliberately choosing the second day of the month lest his boss mistake it for an April Fool’s joke. His resignation was “immediately rejected,” but “with continued encouragement from Keith,” they navigated the process and Anderson started at Bentley in June 1993 as a marketing manager for the Comprehensive Support Program.

He came into a company confident in its prospects. MicroStation V5 was being readied for launch with new features that included photorealistic rendering, binary raster support, custom line styles, dimension-driven design, and a bevy of advanced mathematics courtesy of Brian Peters, whose geometric wizardry was integral to many advances. The first version of MicroStation developed as a native Microsoft Windows application, V5 would be demoed at Bill Gates’ introduction of Windows NT in Baltimore.

Bentley Systems had broken ground on a new headquarters in Exton in 1990. Anticipating growth, it overbuilt, so Anderson walked into a memorable scene. The developers occupied one end of the building, where Keith, Barry, and Ray had offices lining the edges but preferred to work in cubicles to be in the center of the action. The other end looked like empty warehouse space. “There were a couple of cars sitting in there, and a ping pong table, and stuff like that,” Anderson remembered.

Ray, among others, had by this time acquired the financial wherewithal to scratch his itch for classic automobiles. “I parked my Corvette in there,” Ray recalled, “and we used to try to do burnouts inside the warehouse.” Many years later, when the carpet was replaced during renovations to Building 1, workers discovered the telltale marks of whirling car wheels seared into the subfloor.

A certain amount of devil-may-care shenanigans was probably a healthy thing, given how hard everyone worked. (When Ray retired, it emerged that during his 38 years at Bentley Systems, he never once took a sick day.) “Keith, Barry, and Ray wrote code every day,” Anderson observed. “Their cars were among the first in the parking lot every morning ... They were founders, board members, and officers, yet each contributed at the most fundamental level one can in a software company. Occasionally, a young developer would beat one of them into the office and steal their parking spot for the day, but it never lasted. An accomplishment rarely repeated out of respect. Their ‘whatever it takes’ example quietly and profoundly shaped the culture of the Exton campus.”

Cochrane emphasized the fellowship they infused into the collective labor. “When we were all working long hours finalizing MicroStation V5,” he recalled, “Keith sent around a note saying he had $200 in his desk drawer and that anyone working late could just take money from the pile and go get a burger if they needed to.”

At Easter, colleagues would organize egg hunts for company children. At Halloween, they’d turn the office into a trick-or-treating fantasia. “The cubes would be swathed in black, with flashing lights and all kinds of things,” remembered Maria Yeo. “And Keith and Barry were willing to let the meeting room between their offices be turned into a haunted house. The kids had such a good time.”

That aspect of the company’s culture made a vivid impression on Cochrane before he even started. During a house-hunting trip that happened to fall on the eve of Halloween, he wandered into the warehouse to find Keith practically dangling from the rafters with a bundle of decorations. “I think they’d used a scissor lift to get him up there, and he was hanging things from the ceiling,” Cochrane said, “all for the sake of their kids—not just Bentley kids, but all employee kids.”

For the grown-ups, one evening a week, the brothers would rent out a slightly down-at-the-heels bowling alley, cart in a couple of cases of beer, and throw it open to all comers. “And I was really surprised that Keith, Barry, Ray, Scott, and occasionally Greg were there,” Cochrane remembered. “In general, they’re all very introverted—except for Greg—but they all made themselves available for you to get to know on a first-name basis.” When he wasn’t traveling, Cochrane “showed up religiously,” soaking in the lighthearted trash-talk and camaraderie.

It was through these kinds of extracurricular activities that he came to discover that although Scott appeared “to leave his shirttail out on purpose” in the office to cultivate a certain persona, he “will give you the shirt off his back” outside of it. And that for all his visionary foresight, “Keith would sweep the floors if that’s what it took.” And that “people that were seeking out attention rarely got sought out by Ray,” but Ray had a knack for finding kindred spirits and “tended to take people under his wing,” be it in the throes of software development or via a Sunday invitation to watch the Philadelphia Eagles in a home that hummed merrily with kids and dogs and friends and brothers.

“There’s a lot of people who have a lot of love for Ray, and for Barry as well,” Cochrane concluded. “They play as hard as they work, and they’re very into family. That’s how they set the culture of the company, and I was kind of inspired by that.”

Greg’s steadfast focus on users found another manifestation in the 1991 establishment of a third-party developer network. The driving idea was to diversify the spectrum of applications based on MicroStation beyond those developed in-house by Intergraph.

“When Greg first came in,” said Steve Knipmeyer, “the only thing we were working on was MicroStation—which was a reflection of the industry. Applications existed, but they were not really the way most people used graphical design tools. And Greg recognized right away that that’s where the industry—and therefore the company—must head. Greg has so many important contributions, but recognizing the importance of applications is one of the huge contributions that he made. We then began to actively court third-party developers and build up a catalog.”

Greg recognized right away that that’s where the industry—and therefore the company—must head.

An early example was Geopak, a Florida-based firm that had been established in 1984 to develop and market civil engineering software for Intergraph IGDS systems. It was run by a gregarious transportation engineer named Gabe Norona, who, in the early 1990s, shifted the company’s focus toward MicroStation to keep pace with the broader move toward PC CAD systems. “We were the first ones to port all of our software on MDL,” recalled Norona, whose suite of applications ranged from digital terrain modeling to roadway design to drainage planning. His relationship with Bentley Systems would grow steadily deeper in the years ahead.

Another early participant in Bentley’s value-added reseller (VAR) program was HMR, a developer of the raster editing software package Descartes, a pioneer in computer-efficient image tiling. It was led by Styli Camateros and Carey Mann. In the early 1990s, they were assessing development opportunities through companies including Autodesk, the GIS software developer Esri, and the “Bentley/Intergraph” nexus, as Mann put it. During a conference that featured some public friction between Intergraph and Bentley Systems, they were struck by how other attendees responded to the squabble.

“We saw how loyal the developer base was to Bentley—not to Intergraph—and how passionate they were about their software,” Mann recollected. “And they were right.”

Geopak and HMR belonged to a small cluster of developers that called themselves the Graphics Group. It included Jacobus, a plant-design visualization firm headed by Alton (Buddy) Cleveland; and the architecture-focused firm IdeaGraphix. Under the leadership of Warren Winterbottom, who joined Bentley Systems in 1991 after having held a similar role at Intergraph until about a year earlier, the VAR network quickly expanded to encompass about 135 participants across North America and many other countries.1 This effort received an assist from a timely book publication. In 1991, Bill Steinbock, a MicroStation installation manager for the US Army Corps of Engineers, wrote a book titled 101 MDL Commands for Intergraph MicroStation and IGDS Users. He swiftly followed that up with a smaller volume, Bill Steinbock’s Pocket MDL Programmers Guide. After reading one or the other, Barry observed, “A lot of third-party programmers decided that they would try doing MicroStation MDL stuff.”

Bentley’s rededication to users combined with Intergraph’s market reach to drive rapid progress. In 1989, there had been roughly 20,000 copies of MicroStation in use, according to CAD historian David Weisberg. At an average price of $3,000, that implied sales of roughly $60 million in the company’s first five years. Intergraph sold $79 million worth of MicroStation in 1992 alone.² Yet the brothers had been right to be anxious about Intergraph’s fortunes.

1993 was the year that it became obvious that Intergraph’s business model was fundamentally flawed.

Although the 10,000-person company’s revenues reached $1.2 billion in 1991, it earned no more that year than it had in 1987. Between 1991 and 1992, its stock price fell by half. As Weisberg noted, “1993 was the year that it became obvious that Intergraph’s business model was fundamentally flawed.” The fourth quarter found sales down 12.5 percent, “and the company showed a $70 million loss after taking a $76 million charge that resulted from closing manufacturing and distribution facilities in Europe.”3 Fewer and fewer CAD customers were keen to lock themselves into the firm’s proprietary hardware. As the Engineering Automation Report ominously noted that January, “1993 is a year Intergraph might wish it could just skip. It is becoming harder for them to produce workstations that match the computational performance that other vendors bring to the table.” ⁴

Intergraph’s declining earnings did not bode well for Bentley Systems, which wanted its partner to step up efforts to compete against Autodesk. “Intergraph went from a very profitable company, to barely profitable, to almost profitable,” Keith reflected. “And once you cross that threshold where you’re not making money, then it’s really tough to invest in new things and hire people.”

The issue came to a head during a 1993 meeting in Huntsville.

Every time they boarded a plane to Alabama for their quarterly meeting, Keith and Barry would each write down a number on a piece of paper: a guess at what Intergraph would offer them to acquire Bentley Systems outright.

“We were fully expecting that on one of these trips they were going to say, ‘Keith, we’re done,” Keith recalled. “My number was always bigger than Barry’s number,” he said. By this point, it had reached about $50 million. It seemed like only a matter of time before Intergraph capitulated to the reality that the future was in software, not hardware.

At this meeting, Greg presented a plan to Jim Meadlock for how the companies could win market share from Autodesk, “which was eating Intergraph’s lunch,” in Keith’s estimation. But a slide deck focusing on software, delivered by a Wharton MBA, was perhaps doomed from the outset.

Keith regarded Intergraph’s chief as a “complete gentleman.” In Barry’s view, “Meadlock was very tolerant of Keith and me—we were techies. Meadlock was a very smart guy, but he was a hardware guy. He had little time for sales and marketing guys.”

“He sat at the head of the conference room, put his feet up on the table, and was sitting there throwing a baseball up and down,” Barry said. “He gave Greg not even 10 minutes of a 40-minute presentation, and then just cut him off, and wouldn’t let him talk again.”

Beneath polite facades, the brothers seethed. “I will tell you, that was the end of any kind of productive relationship between Intergraph and Bentley Systems,” Barry later reflected. From that moment on, the brothers resolved that “Bentley Systems was not going down with the SS Intergraph.”

Of course, the view from Meadlock’s end of the table was a little different.

Intergraph had underestimated David Nation’s handiwork.

“They were looking at how much money they were paying to the Bentleys,” observed George Church, who’d had a front-row seat before leaving Intergraph in 1992, “and saying, ‘We just can’t afford to keep paying them this. We’ve got to build something to replace this, for the good of our shareholders.’” To that end, Intergraph had initiated a “skunkworks project” to replace MicroStation with a new software package of their own. Code-named Jupiter, after the Florida town where Meadlock had a vacation home, the effort did not take long to ping on Bentley Systems’ radar.

“They had decided that they needed to have their own software on the PC—and made no secret of that internally,” Greg said. Yet although Intergraph’s intent to compete was apparent, “they didn’t believe we would be able to do anything”—namely, exercise the contractual escape clause to regain the right to sell MicroStation directly—“before they came to market with it.”

If that was so, Intergraph had underestimated David Nation’s handiwork. The agreement stipulated that “we would have the ability to sell MicroStation ourselves if Intergraph competed with us,” Barry explained, “but the language was ambiguous.” It denoted competition with a Bentley Systems product, not MicroStation specifically. And Intergraph had launched a review-only package called DMView, which was awfully similar to a Bentley niche product called MicroStation Review. These two products accounted for “miniscule, microscopic” revenues at each company, Barry allowed. But some industry analysts were bullish on the market potential of view-only CAD software, and Greg recognized an opportunity to invoke the non-competition provision before Intergraph brought Project Jupiter to fruition. So, to compress a predictably litigious episode into two sentences, in walked David Nation to execute the play he’d drawn up in 1987. For the avocational basketball player and volunteer coach that he was, the legal maneuver must have felt like catching his own alley-oop pass, lofted seven years before, and slamming it through the hoop.

In May 1994, Intergraph and Bentley Systems announced a revision to their relationship involving “a gradual transition to independent operations for Bentley Systems beginning immediately.”5 Intergraph retained its 50 percent ownership stake, but, thanks to Nation’s foresight, Greg was now on the board of directors alongside Keith and Barry, giving Bentley Systems autonomy to determine its own course.

But like most divorces (which is how it was widely regarded), this one had played out over a period of months and culminated right before the annual IGUG conference in Huntsville—from which Intergraph now excluded Bentley Systems.

For seven years, the IGUG conference had been the most important week on Bentley Systems’ calendar. It was an unparalleled opportunity to deepen relationships with longtime users and connect with prospective ones. For a pair of coders who felt most at home in their cubicle cocoons, Keith and Barry morphed into something like CAD celebrities on the trade show floor. And the stakes were big in 1994. Bentley Systems wanted to show off MicroStation V5, flash a sneak preview of a new parametric solid modeling system for mechanical design called MicroStation Modeler, and shine a light on the growing number of third-party applications it had cultivated. The company was set to assume full responsibility for marketing and selling MicroStation on January 1, 1995. Exile from Huntsville’s Von Braun Center may not have risen to the level of an existential threat, but it was an alarming shot across the bow.

All this set the stage for Scott Bentley, whose remit had diminished to some degree with Greg’s arrival, to have what many regarded as his finest hour. In league with a coterie of third- party developers from Bentley Systems’ network, he discovered a vacant mall about one-third of a mile from the Von Braun Center’s convention hall. “For pennies, you could rent the whole place for a week,” Scott remembered. “So we did.” Gabe Norona of Geopak would later recall inking an agreement with the mall’s managers—because as a MicroStation-based developer, Intergraph had expelled him from IGUG as well. “I got a call from the head people at Intergraph, who proposed making us the ones to write the civil design software for them—but only if we made it run exclusively on their machines.” Norona rejected that idea out of hand—“we already knew the PC market was coming”—and donned his real-estate hat. “It was a very dilapidated mall ... but I went ahead and rented it for the period of this IGUG conference,” he laughed. “I was a renegade, but of course, I had the Bentleys with us and a whole bunch of other guys.”

The splinter faction included Jacobus, IdeaGraphix, and HMR. “Intergraph basically banned all the Graphics Group members,” said HMR’s Carey Mann, “because we were all marketing to the same people, and some of our products were competitive with Intergraph products.”

But it would take more than a pop-up lease to answer the next question: If you rent it, will they come?

“How were we going to get the Intergraph people to walk to the old Heart of Huntsville Mall,” as Scott said, “when Intergraph would say nothing about it?” Brainstorming with his counterparts, he landed on a few ideas. One was to publish a daily newspaper called The MicroStation News, and exercise their First Amendment rights by handing it out directly in front of the Von Braun Center. Envisioning a mix of prewritten articles and on-the-scene snapshots taken with Apple’s new black-and-white digital camera, Scott hit the bricks in Huntsville to find a printing house—only to be turned away by every last publisher in town, out of fear that they’d be blackballed by one of the city’s most prestigious companies. By the time he had driven far enough to find a taker, Scott was on the other side of the Tennessee River, in a 587-soul town called Hillsboro.

“We drove an Apple diskette there each night and the papers were delivered the next morning,” said Scott. “I was told, and I believe, that Intergraph executives were furious. You know: We get all these people to come on our nickel, and these Bentley Systems people—a company we own half of—have the gall!”

“It was controversial,” Scott allowed. “I mean, we did say a few things in the newspaper that we knew Intergraph wouldn’t like. But it’s America. What can you do? And all these people—almost everybody—tromped down to the Heart of Huntsville Mall.”

They didn’t need a map to get there, because the second big idea had been to paint footprints on the sidewalk leading the way from the Von Braun Center. Tom Anderson took part in this covert operation with Dave Dadoly and an Intergraph employee named Rob Snyder. With what Anderson called “a small per diem, a little risk-taking, and a pretty good beer buzz,” they executed their plan under the cover of night.

“We made a stencil out of a sheet of foam core and cut the shape of two footprints out of it,” he recalled. “Rob and I bought two gallons of white latex house paint and a garden weed sprayer,” figuring that latex paint would wash off easily later.

“If I remember correctly,” said Scott, “we decided to wear reflective vests, so we’d look like we were doing something legal. But it turned out that nobody cared. Besides, I think it was 10 or 11 o’clock at night.”

“We waited until after dark,” Anderson recalled, “and then proceeded to paint the sidewalk from the Civic Center to the mall.” The distance was a few hundred yards, but to the cloak-and-dagger crew, “it felt like a mile. Every few feet, we’d place the foam core on the sidewalk, spray the paint through the footprint-shaped holes, and then move on. When cars approached, we’d drop everything and hide for a moment, then continue. By the time we were finished, we were sweaty but proud, and we stashed the evidence under a nearby bridge.”

Presumably, it was their daytime identities as upright, law-abiding citizens that caused them to hide rather than destroy the incriminating implements. But their inexperience as graffiti artists proved fortuitous when an overnight rain shower washed all the footprints away, necessitating a second go-round the following night.

It became known as the Blackball Mall, and make no mistake, it was an act of rebellion.

The final enticement to the old mall came about after a giant order of promotional tool belts got snagged in a customs snafu. Fretting over the loss of a giveaway, but cheered by Scott’s revelation that the operation was well under budget, the plotters decided to raffle away a new Ford Probe GT. As Norona later reflected: “You want people to show up? Give away a car. It was insane … I’ll never forget, the first day of the mall being open, there were people lined up and down to get in. It was incredible.”

Inside, attendees took in cutting-edge computer graphics amidst a festival atmosphere. “There was a bar in the upper level called Roper’s,” Anderson recalled, “the kind of country bar where you would go and do the Texas two-step—and they stayed open throughout the whole thing. So people were walking up to Roper’s, and then walking around the trade show with a beer. Everybody thought it was so cool—because it was so irreverent and rebellious,” Anderson concluded. “It became known as the Blackball Mall, and make no mistake, it was an act of rebellion: a bold statement to our users that we would not be silenced—we had capabilities they wanted and we were going to do whatever it took to give them a demo.”

In a further twist, Intergraph’s ire inadvertently exacerbated the exodus from their own conference. “The Von Braun Civic Center had us internally—not with the police—cited for vandalism,” Scott recalled. “And they wanted those footsteps gone.” He suggested that they need only to wait for the next rain—but that wasn’t cutting it.

So, in the end, Von Braun Center employees were hired in their off hours to pressure-wash the footprints. “So, they take this 2000psi thing and remove the latex paint,” Scott laughed, “but they’re removing a quarter-inch of concrete too. So now, what was temporary footsteps were permanent! We’d go back 10 years later, and you could still see the footprints where these guys removed the paint!”

Never before and never again would Bentley Systems mount a guerilla marketing campaign of such verve and daring. The Blackball Mall episode was suffused with a kind of panache that was a little out-of-character. Barry wondered if “we overdid that, and stirred up bad feelings that could have been avoided.” But there was no question that “Scotty’s doing,” as he called it, “was effective.” And its legacy went well beyond the splash it made in the moment.

As Scott reflected, “We weren’t the only people who were chafing under the boots of Intergraph.” The inspired antics of Blackball Mall tightened Bentley Systems’ relationships with a number of third-party developers who would go on to become integral components of the company’s next chapter.

“We had already known Keith and Barry,” said Geopak’s Gabe Norona. “But that really got us closer together—and then shortly after that, we started talking” about forming a strategic partnership.

HMR’s Carey Mann offered a similar gloss. "I think all of the companies were trying to figure out their business strategies, long term. We still had aspirations to be in other markets, or have versions of our software that would maybe stand alone" from a platform like MicroStation. "It wasn’t for another couple of years that we really decided that we weren’t going to do that," he said, but the sense of excitement about what an alliance with Bentley could bring was born in Blackball Mall. In time, Bentley Systems would invest in, and eventually acquire, both Geopak and HMR—along with Jacobus and IdeaGraphix. For Norona, Mann, and others, the 1994 IGUG intrigue felt like the moment they started banding together.

Bentley could scarcely have picked a more pivotal moment to distinguish itself as a quick-witted and capable champion of its users. For in just eight months, the company would have to transform itself from a software development shop into a full-fledged business that could do everything from marketing and sales to manufacturing the cardboard kits in which MicroStation would be shipped on floppy disks.

"We needed to adopt all these things that Intergraph had done implicitly," said Greg. "And we had to do it starting January 1, 1995."