Busy BSY
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“In the case of infrastructure and engineering software, we need all the talent we can find, and we have a very good record of keeping it.”
Bentley Systems entered 2016 as a 3,200-person company generating annual revenues of about $600 million. Roughly 40 percent of colleagues worked in the Americas, with the remainder split fairly evenly between Europe, the Middle East and Africa on one hand, and Asia on the other. Nearly a third were millennials, and the average years of service was seven. Almost a quarter of Bentley’s workforce had come from acquisitions.
“In some other fields, acquisitions are done for synergies, which means you don’t need all the people,” Greg reflected. “In the case of infrastructure and engineering software, we need all the talent we can find, and we have a very good record of keeping it. The founders are generally generalists and rainmakers who have sold, have done their own business development, and have made a payroll. It is just a great formula for someone who can be successful in our company. The bulk of our senior management have come from such acquisitions.”1
Since 2008, Bentley Systems had invested over $1 billion in R&D and acquisitions.
In 2016, Greg wanted to “coalesce more of the decision-making and authority in the great technical leadership we had, who were largely these acquired principals in the middle level of the company.” Since 2008, Bentley Systems had invested over $1 billion in R&D and acquisitions. This was reflected in the breadth of the product portfolio. Bentley’s “Project Playbooks” offered dozens of modeling and simulation packages adapted for every aspect of the built environment—from mining and subsurface utilities and offshore structures, to roads and rail and bridges, to nuclear power and wind farms and water infrastructure. The company’s enterprise platforms had also grown in significance. Among Engineering News-Record’s top 50 design firms, 45 used ProjectWise. About 100 of the top 500 infrastructure owners used AssetWise, a market Bentley hoped to grow by developing infrastructure digital twins.2
So, in his annual colleague update, Greg talked about the company’s growth opportunity “from innovation to advancement,” and described the alignment for new business driven by CONNECT software editions. He introduced an “executive cabinet” that would lead the company’s next phase. The roster featured many familiar names—and two notable absences. After 20 years as Bentley’s general counsel, and inestimable contributions to the company’s early trajectory, David Nation retired in 2015 and would tragically pass away the following summer. Meanwhile, 2016 was the year Malcolm Walter stepped down as COO, taking on a VP role in subscription services on his way to full retirement in 2018.
Nation was succeeded by his longtime deputy David Shaman, who’d joined Bentley in 1998 and spent the next seven years working from the company’s offices in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, before moving to Exton to become deputy general counsel. Pursuant to the retirement of Human Resources head Mark Hagerty, Florence Zheng was named to the new role of Chief Talent Officer. David Hollister remained CFO, with responsibility for Operations Advancement and Portfolio Development. Carey Mann was Chief Marketing Officer and Chris Barron became Chief Communications Officer.
Rob Whitesell led Platform Advancement. Chief Product Officer Bhupinder Singh oversaw four affiliated leaders: Santanu Das for Design Modeling; Harry Vitelli for Project Delivery; Phil Christensen for Analytical Modeling; and Alan Kiraly for Asset Performance.
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“I set a goal for myself,” he recalled, “and I actually wrote it down on a Post-It note and stuck it on my mirror. It said, Can you make it in a larger corporate environment?”
Commercial Advancement was organized around geographic leaders, with Kaushik Chakraborty promoted to Regional Executive for Southeast Asia and South Asia based in Singapore, and Brian Middleton promoted to Regional Executive for Australia and New Zealand. They joined Eric Fletcher and David McKenney for North America, Paulo Roncada for South America, Alan Lamont and JB Monnier for Europe/Middle East/Africa, Chris Liew for North Asia, and John Riddle for Global Accounts, Dave Dadoly for Global Commercial Accounts, and George Church for Channel Programs.
Meanwhile, Bentley named a new Chief Revenue Officer: Gus Bergsma. This was the culmination for the amiable structural engineer, who’d come into the company via the 2005 acquisition of RAM International. At that time, the prospect of moving from the top of a small company to the middle of a big one seemed daunting. “I set a goal for myself,” he recalled, “and I actually wrote it down on a Post-It note and stuck it on my mirror. It said, Can you make it in a larger corporate environment?”After early success running global structural engineering for Bentley, he talked his way into adding water/wastewater to his brief. Bergsma credited his professional growth in part to senior colleagues of long standing. “John Riddle really did teach me a lot about navigating large organizations,” he reflected. Ted Lamboo was another influence, both for his deep experience and his forthright opinions. “He did a zillion great things for Bentley Systems,” Bergsma said, “And I would listen to everything Ted said—because every now and then, I’d be listening to him and I’d go, ‘Damn, that’s a really good idea! I didn’t think of that!’”
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“Bentley had a good team of executive leaders,” Bergsma reflected. “And this sounds kind of funny to say, but I was a sucker for a team.”
In 2011, Malcolm Walter offered Bergsma the opportunity to run small accounts and third-party sales channels globally. Walter, in Bergsma’s view, embodied the “fundamental definition of good leadership: set direction, build alignment, and inspire and motivate. Malcolm was good at all that.”
“Bentley had a good team of executive leaders,” Bergsma reflected. “And this sounds kind of funny to say, but I was a sucker for a team.”
Bergsma’s easygoing demeanor and knack for deflective humor fit the classic image of a natural salesman. But colleagues recognized capabilities that went deeper than charm. “He’ll come across as a gunslinger,” observed Harry Vitelli, “but don’t let his robust personality get in the way of his strategic thinking about how to actually manage an account and sell subscriptions. I was always impressed with him because he could take a step back and put processes in place.”
“There was always a method to my madness,” Bergsma laughed. “Whether anyone knew it or not, there was.”Technical acumen had long marked Bentley Systems’ sales force. As a structural engineer who knew his discipline inside and out, Bergsma checked that box. His peers were stereotyped as “guys with pocket protectors and calculators—and some of those cliches are true, including for me,” he reflected. “So, I could relate.”
But sales-oriented engineers were few and far between, meaning he couldn’t hope to build a sustainable team by looking for clones—especially as Bentley’s software became increasingly sophisticated and specialized. “So we had to take regular folks who could begin to understand the technologies—what the accounts used, why they used it—and they had to be able to rely on a technical-resources team that could teach them how to run product demonstrations and answer technical questions.”
They also needed to be “effective at communicating price increases and the justifications for those,” he said, “because we started to attack discounting.”
In strategic terms, subscriptions remained a point of emphasis. In 2018, Bentley introduced a new type called E365, which provided unrestricted access to the company’s software based upon daily usage. Bergsma also concentrated on aligning sales targets with product development priorities. “Bhupinder and I were adamant about that,” he said. “We wanted to be selling the products they wanted us to sell, and Bhupinder and I worked hard at that.” Meanwhile longtime colleagues like Jim Kaiser (VP of Global Financial Operations) and Bob Hewitt (VP of Business Intelligence and Sales Operations) pushed the ball forward in their own domains.
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“I felt like we were all rowing the boat in the same direction.”
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Once the new organizational structure gelled, results followed. Between 2016 and 2019, annual revenues grew from $591 million to $735 million. As Bergsma put it, “I felt like we were all rowing the boat in the same direction.”
Bentley’s new organizational alignment was the culmination of a process that had been almost two decades in the making—ever since Greg’s forceful response to the company’s surprise 1998 loss. “Nobody’s going to hire anybody without my approving,” he had decreed back then, in emergency-management mode. Necessary though that may have been at the time, the concentration of power was not entirely benign. When Malcolm Walter came aboard the next year, he was surprised by the level of micromanagement he found. “It looks like people don’t go to the bathroom,” he thought, “until they ask Greg.”
“We had to change quickly and completely,” Greg reflected later. “And only if you have a CEO named Bentley in a company named Bentley can you make changes as quickly as we did.”
This company probably wouldn’t have survived if it didn’t have people named Bentley with a backbone, he elaborated, because there was a typical playbook for companies in trouble: “Management would get dumped, a new crew would come in—and they would spend a couple of years to get acclimated to figure out what to do.” By which point the situation would have gotten even worse.
But in 1998, Greg felt he knew what needed to be done. “I just had to wrestle everything completely sideways,” he recalled. It was a “lonely, formidable” task, but he had to impose his will. I felt responsibility to the family, the brothers. And the brothers were deferring to me. I knew what was right—shame on me if I didn’t change it tomorrow.
The organizational work of the next 15 or 20 years, he reflected, entailed rebuilding balance to take advantage of the company’s deep and growing talent pool. “Once we had the structure set up so everyone was pulling in the same direction, God bless them!” Greg said. “I could give them rope and keep my mouth shut!”
I felt responsibility to the family, the brothers. And the brothers were deferring to me.I knew what was right—shame on me if I didn’t change it tomorrow.
By the mid-2010s, this aspect of Bentley’s managerial culture had fully metamorphosed. “People who are waiting for Greg to say something’s okay,” David Hollister remarked, “are not moving fast enough for Greg.”
As the organization hit its stride, new acquisitions continued to signal its ambition. In 2018, Bentley acquired Plaxis, a leading provider of geotechnical software based in Delft, Netherlands; and the Canada-based soil engineering software provider SoilVision, making Bentley a complete source for geotechnical professionals. It also acquired Synchro Software to extend digital workflows for project delivery through 4D construction modeling; the Sweden-based company Agency9, a provider of city-scale digital twin cloud services and web-based 3D visualization for city planning; and Quebec City-based AIWorx, specialists in machine learning.
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The same year brought the announcement of iTwin Services, a digital twin cloud service for infrastructure projects (project digital twins) and assets (performance digital twins). It would be provisioned within Bentley’s Connected Data Environment for ProjectWise and AssetWise users and would be led by Bhupinder Singh.
Greg kicked off the 2019 Year in Infrastructure Conference in Singapore with a keynote explaining how the evolution from 2D CAD, 2.5D GIS, and 3D BIM had set the stage for 4D digital twins, which could remain live and evergreen over the lifecycle of an infrastructure asset, providing valuable insights about how a project or asset would behave over time, and how it would respond to changes—be they planned or unforeseen.
In a public conversation with Greg, Sada Iyer, Shell’s VP of projects and engineering, explained how the oil and gas giant viewed digital twins, stressing that the industry had shifted its emphasis from capital efficiency to lifecycle optimization. Shell saw the technology as a way to rehearse construction planning virtually and produce dynamic simulation models for process analysis. When a new process required changes, Iyer said, the company could use an as-built digital twin to gauge its possible effects, helping it to minimize disruptions and optimize functionality within the actual facility.3
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Forward-looking cities also showed interest in the technology. In 2019, the Singapore Land Authority partnered with Bentley to create a digital twin of the entire country. Some 160,000 aerial images were fed into ContextCapture to create a nationwide 3D reality mesh. Accurate to one-tenth of a meter and intended to support 4D capabilities to register changes over time, this virtual replica aimed to help policymakers model and improve everything from cellphone coverage and traffic flow, to the AI-aided automation of rail maintenance planning, to stormwater capture and Dengue fever outbreaks.4 Officials in Helsinki, Finland looked to digital twins to improve quality of life in broad terms, be it by providing an open-source atlas featuring solar-energy calculations for every roof and wall in the city,5 or using their modeling and analysis capabilities to pursue the goal of saving every resident a half-hour per day.6
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Digital twins represented “the biggest opportunity to improve the overall value contribution of technology to infrastructure since the personal computer.”
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In Keith’s view, the highly specific nature of digital twins made it unlikely that any single vendor would dominate the marketplace for them. “Practically every instance of a digital twin is going to involve a heterogeneous mix of vendors and data sources and use cases. You’re not going to get to all that from Bentley as a bespoke product, like we can in the design world,” he said. But surveying the state of play in 2020, he was convinced that Bentley could become a central player by adopting an open-source approach. “We think customers will use our libraries to internally create solutions or perhaps developers will make things for sale, and we’ll benefit indirectly. We are okay with that if there are more iModels in the world, we will have more relevance, more opportunity to sell our iTwin Services, but you don’t have to buy everything from Bentley... The way we can be most relevant is by participating in the ecosystem that will be there, making what you consume from Bentley as easily integrable as possible into the world of other people’s software and other companies.”7
Digital twins, he thought, represented “the biggest opportunity to improve the overall value contribution of technology to infrastructure since the personal computer.”8
Bentley Systems’ expanding scope also drew the interest of bigger companies in the 2010s, most notably the German multinational technology conglomerate Siemens. Siemens, a giant in the process and manufacturing industries, was expanding its infrastructure portfolio at this time. It recognized value in Bentley’s sector-specific 3D modeling tools. Carsten Gerke, a Germany-based Bentley colleague who’d gotten his start as an account manager in 1995 and risen to VP of strategic partnerships in 2016, played an instrumental role in shaping an alliance between the two companies—opening up strategic options for Bentley.
Building on a collaboration that had begun in 2012, Bentley and Siemens formalized a strategic partnership in 2016. The companies announced joint investment initiatives aimed at “new growth opportunities in industry and infrastructure through integration of complementary digital engineering models.” Among the partnership’s fruits was the joint development and commercialization of PlantSight, a digital twin solution for process and plants overseen by Ken Adamson. Siemens also acquired €70 million in secondary shares of Bentley Systems stock. Within a fairly short span, Siemens’ cumulative purchases of non-voting shares from colleagues and retirees on Nasdaq Private Market resulted in its ownership of 9 percent of fully diluted shares.9
“At one time I thought we were going to get acquired by Siemens,” said Gabe Norona. That was a live possibility as the decade advanced, but the wind shifted in 2020 when Bentley filed an S-1 in anticipation of an initial public offering.
The company had moved toward an IPO twice before. It had first tried in 2002, but abandoned the effort after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted midway through the process. Bentley tried again in 2015, making three SEC filings before deciding not to proceed when the IPO market stalled in the wake of a global commodity-price shock. In 2020, headwinds turned into tailwinds partly due to the paradoxical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As lockdowns and travel restrictions sent companies scrambling to figure out how to make remote work productive, Bentley’s proven collaboration tools were ready to fill the need. License sales and usage took an early hit, but once the infrastructure industry grasped the implications, the pandemic proved to be a huge motivation for moving toward cloud-based collaboration and digital workflows.
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As lockdowns and travel restrictions sent companies scrambling to figure out how to make remote work productive, Bentley’s proven collaboration tools were ready to fill the need.
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“It was a good story to tell in our IPO: Here’s an example of how our users can use our solutions to get their work done,” said David Hollister. Another key advantage, he added, was that uncertainty in the stock market had touched off a “flight to quality—and our cash flows and our revenue were as visible and predictable and stable as you’re going to find.”
For the Bentley brothers, this was a long time coming. “We owe our IPO to David Hollister,” said Greg, who also credited David Shaman with helping complete a process that his predecessor David Nation had done so much to advance. The third attempt was likewise a satisfaction for longtime controller Brian Doane, who’d been involved in each round of preparations. Yet the brothers’ approach to the IPO was unusual in a way that exemplified both their faith in the company and their commitment to longtime colleagues who’d made the journey with them.
What was unique about our situation is that it was driven by a desire to create liquidity not for our primary shareholders, but for our colleagues.
“Most companies do an IPO because the primary shareholder or group of shareholders wants to exit the business,” Hollister observed, “and/or they’re motivated to generate growth capital.
“Neither of those was the case” in Bentley’s public offering, he remarked. “In fact, none of our primary shareholders sold any shares in the IPO. And our company was already flush with cash—and we had ample borrowing capacities to support our growth ambitions at the time.”
“What was unique about our situation,” he went on, “is that it was driven by a desire to create liquidity not for our primary shareholders, but for our colleagues.Stock options and equity have been a key part of the company culture for a long time … and at that time nearly one-third of the business was owned by colleagues not named Bentley.”
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“Many of these colleagues were approaching retirement age or had retirement ambitions—or had retired and still had shares,” he said, “so we just considered it a ripe time to facilitate that—and it happened to align with the market opportunity.”
On September 23, 2020, Bentley Systems made a successful public offering at $22 per share. The following day, it started trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol BSY (pronounced “busy”), opening at $28 and closing at $33.49 in a strong market debut.By the time Greg rang the opening bell in March 2023—a ceremony postponed by the pandemic—the company’s stock was up an additional 25 percent.
On September 23, 2020, Bentley Systems made a successful public offering at $22 per share. The following day, it started trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol BSY, opening at $28 and closing at $33.49 in a strong market debut.
Bentley Systems’ transition to public ownership was both a culmination and a new beginning. Barry Bentley retired from day-to-day coding shortly before the IPO, joining Steve Knipmeyer and John Riddle. In 2020, Greg announced the impending retirement of eight colleagues he honored as “pillars” of the company’s success: Gabe Norona, Carey Mann, Mike Coldrick, Alan Lamont, Bhupinder Singh, JB Monnier, Ted Lamboo, and George Church. Ray followed his older brother into retirement in 2021—though both Bentleys continued to serve on the board. The years between 2020 and 2023 also saw the retirement of a host of long-serving and influential colleagues including Tom Anderson, Styli Camateros, Gary Cochrane, Chris Barron, Dave Dadoly, Vonnie Smith, Gino Cortesi, David Hollister, and Jim Bartlett.
As one generation marched toward another phase of life—taking up pursuits ranging from charitable work and consulting to travel and woodworking—Bentley Systems refreshed its leadership ranks with a new vanguard.
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As one generation marched toward another phase of life—taking up pursuits ranging from charitable work and consulting to travel and woodworking—Bentley refreshed its leadership ranks with a new vanguard.
Nicholas Cumins, a dual citizen of the United States and France, succeeded Bhupinder Singh as Chief Product Officer in September 2020, just before the IPO. Cumins had previously served as general manager of SAP Marketing Cloud after occupying a variety of senior roles including product management, corporate strategy, and business development in the United States, Germany, and France. He had also served as chief product officer of Scytl, a platform for online voting, in Barcelona, and senior vice president of products with OpenX, a pioneer in programmatic advertising, in Los Angeles.
Chris Bradshaw became Chief Marketing Officer the same year, having previously served in that role (among several others) at Autodesk. Katriona Lord-Levins, who also had public-company experience as an executive at Autodesk, came aboard in 2020 as Chief Success Officer—stepping into a user-oriented role whose roots could be traced back to George Church and Gary Cochrane—and was an evangelist of Keith’s motto that “everyone’s in support.” In 2021 Werner Andre was promoted to CFO, succeeding David Hollister.
Neither the Nasdaq listing nor the influx of new talent was treated as an occasion to pause and catch a collective breath. Shortly before the IPO, Bentley announced the formation of The Cohesive Companies, led by SVP Noah Eckhouse. Anchored by the acquisition of Cohesive Solutions, an Atlanta-based integrator of IBM Maximo, this new venture also incorporated Bentley’s AssetWise services team. It aimed to help infrastructure asset owners upgrade their enterprise environments to leverage digital twins. Eckhouse got it on firm footing before retiring the following year, handing the reins to Mark Bew.
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Bentley also launched Virtuosity, a separately branded e-store led by Allan Murphy, SVP of Product Sales, as a reseller of subscriptions bundling Bentley software products with expert services.
“Believe it or not,” said Greg, “by the time we went public, at 37 years old, we had never done an e-commerce transaction. Nobody had ever acquired our software other than through a purchase order and a signed contract and an account manager.” The time was ripe to expand Bentley’s go-to-market strategies.
In the first annual colleague update since becoming a public company—but the second since the pandemic shift to working from home—Greg started out in lighthearted form by reminding everyone what a physical office looked like. He kicked off the proceedings by showing a reality mesh of the TPB Building at corporate headquarters and a photo he had taken earlier that morning of an empty parking lot, where rain was melting the remains of the winter’s snow drifts. Despite it all, Bentley was weathering the pandemic well enough for its stock price to have powered into the mid-$40s.
The company also remained aggressive on the acquisition front, and completed two especially big deals in 2021. In March, Bentley inked an agreement valued at $1.05 billion to acquire Seequent, a New Zealand-based global leader in 3D modeling software for geological modeling. Its 430 colleagues and Leapfrog software gave Bentley an unparalleled platform for modeling subsurface environments. November brought a second “platform acquisition” via the $700 million addition of Power Line Systems (PLS), a leader in software for the design of overhead electric power transmission lines.
In 2022, former Seequent CIO James Lawton became Bentley’s first Chief Digital Officer, and Nicholas Cumins was promoted to Chief Operating Officer. Succeeding Cumins as Chief Product Officer was Michael Campbell, a mechanical engineer whose 17-year career with product engineering software leader PTC Inc. ranged from product leadership for IoT applications to serving as general manager for augmented reality offerings. Suzanne Little became Chief Colleague Success Officer after 11 years in varied HR positions within Bentley Systems.
“It is clear to me that infrastructure digital twins are the future of our industry and our company.”
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The annual Year in Infrastructure Conference returned to London that November, after having been virtual during the pandemic. It brought the announcement of Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, a combination of enterprise systems spanning the end-to-end infrastructure lifecycle and value chain encompassing ProjectWise for project delivery, SYNCHRO for construction, and AssetWise for asset operations. Under the leadership of longtime colleague Adam Klatzkin—whom Keith credited with conducting “a masterclass in figuring out ever-changing tactical priorities given an ambitious paradigm-changing strategic plan”— the company also launched iTwin Experience, iTwin Capture, and iTwin IoT (Internet of Things) to extend the iTwin Platform, significantly extending the scope and interoperability of infrastructure data that engineering firms and owner-operators can use to create and leverage digital twins.
“It is clear to me that infrastructure digital twins are the future of our industry and our company,” said Keith in a keynote speech. “Phase Two of our journey involves improving our existing desktop products using the same iTwin engine. Users of our MicroStation and engineering design and analysis applications will next gain new features that can make their projects more efficient, more connected, and the results more valuable. We can do that by augmenting—not replacing—their existing tools, workflows, file formats, and deliverables.”
The year ended with a historic milestone. For the first time, annual recurring revenue exceeded $1 billion,with total revenues of $1.099 billion. It was the ultimate feather in any number of colleagues’ caps, but none more so than Gus Bergsma, who retired as Chief Revenue Officer in 2023.
“We could not have come nearly so far,” said Greg upon Bergsma’s retirement, “without Gus’s indefatigable resolve and empathy for both infrastructure engineers, where he started professionally himself, and for our colleagues whose successful careers in sales he, in many cases, launched, and certainly exemplified. Gus has shown the way from cofounding a startup to achieving Bentley Systems’ billion-dollar revenue milestone as a public company.”
It is practically unique for any mature software company to have had, for its lifetime, a chief inventor who has also been its chief evangelist, both for the work of its engineer users and developers.
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Succeeding Bergsma was Brock Ballard, who’d come to Bentley Systems in 2020 after holding sales leadership positions with Dassault Systèmes, Autodesk, and Océ. The company’s senior leadership team continued to evolve with the appointment of Kristin Fallon as Chief Marketing Officer, succeeding Chris Bradshaw, who took on the newly created role of Chief Sustainability Officer.
Keith’s contributions to the substance and articulation of our work have never slowed down.
The billion-dollar milestone was even more momentous for the next core colleague to announce his retirement—seeing as this one had once hoped to sell the software that started it all for a cool $5,000. Keith Bentley stepped down as CTO in April 2023 after having prepared Julien Moutte to receive the baton. “It is practically unique,” said Greg upon the occasion, “for any mature software company to have had, for its lifetime, a chief inventor who has also been its chief evangelist, both for the work of its engineer users and developers. Bentley Systems was founded in 1984 to commercialize Keith Bentley’s software for infrastructure engineering, and Keith’s contributions to the substance and articulation of our work have never slowed down, culminating in our market-leading iTwin Platform for infrastructure digital twins.”
“What our users do with our products, makes a difference in the world. ”
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At a celebratory August gathering in Exton—where Florence Zheng playfully presented him with a Lego bonsai kit to ensure he didn’t enter retirement without a project to keep him busy—Keith reflected on his professional life. Striking an introspective tone, he offered an observation that was perhaps unusual for a man attending a party in his honor, but emblematic of a founder who had never lost sight of the people and purposes he ultimately served.
“I don’t know if you would qualify software as a noble career,” he remarked. “If you’re in the medical profession, it’s obvious: you help people. Or if you’re in the military, or an educator. But one thing I credit Greg with,” he went on, “is making it clear to us that even though all we do is write software—just bytes on a disc—it makes a difference. What our users do with our products, makes a difference in the world.”
“So, it’s a little indirect,” Keith concluded, expanding the scope of his remarks to encompass the other 165 colleagues who had retired since the IPO, “but we made a difference, I think—I hope.”
He also professed excitement about the next chapter—not so much his own as that of Bentley Systems, on whose board he would continue to serve. “We are in a very exciting time in our business,” he said, enthusing over advances in connected computing and artificial intelligence, and what they portended for infrastructure engineering.“Today is a beginning.”
As it approached its 40th birthday, Bentley Systems had been through enough endings and beginnings to view them as opportunities for renewal. And one more turning point came on the first day of spring 2024.
“I am very pleased to be able to retire from CEO responsibilities this year,” Greg announced at the opening event for Bentley’s new U.K. headquarters at 8 Bishopsgate in the City of London on March 21, noting that annual recurring revenue and operating margins had grown to their highest levels in the company’s history under COO Nicholas Cumins. “And vitally,” he continued, “over the three-plus years since BSY’s IPO and the expected retirement wave that enabled, we fully reinvigorated our executive leadership with a high-functioning cadre that, while 20 years younger, benefits from valuable public-company experience and is already reaching its collaborative stride.”
For many years, retiring colleagues had enjoyed thoughtful sendoffs crafted by their CEO. Now, that job fell to a new one.
“This year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Bentley Systems, at its essence a company of engineers for engineers,” began Nicholas Cumins, who would formally take the helm on July 1. “Remarkably, the company has been founder- and family-led throughout those four decades. Greg has presided over an extraordinary legacy of long-term growth, sustained innovation, and value creation inspired by a commitment to advancing the world’s infrastructure for better quality of life.”
“Greg has had a profound influence on the lives and careers of Bentley colleagues, and, together with them, on infrastructure engineers worldwide, taking pride in their work and what Bentley software enables them to accomplish,” Cumins went on. “His entrepreneurial spirit is deeply embedded in the company’s culture and values. I am honored to have been selected to follow in his footsteps, and I represent the Bentley leadership team when I say we are confident in our readiness and growth mindset for the coming decades.”
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“Remarkably, the company has been founder- and family-led throughout those four decades. Greg has presided over an extraordinary legacy of long-term growth, sustained innovation, and value creation inspired by a commitment to advancing the world’s infrastructure for better quality of life.”
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Commitment to Comprehensiveness
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Oak or banyan? Barry Bentley drew a vivid contrast between the two species of trees to illustrate the history of Bentley Systems. Oak trees symbolize strength, endurance, and longevity, some living for more than 1,000 years. With strong roots and stout trunks, oaks grow a dense canopy of leaves, and bear a bountiful fruit of acorns that provide sustenance. But with characteristic wry humor, Barry suggested that if Bentley Systems were a tree, it would be a banyan—a dense thicket of intertwined and tangled branches that reach down into the soil, take root and spread indefinitely. Indeed, the complex root structure of the banyan tree is perhaps the more fitting analogy for Bentley’s expansion and continuous regeneration. Bentley encompasses much more than a single core idea and years of carefully cultivated growth. Its scope, reach, and diversity have multiplied many times over from the grafting of more than 120 programmatic acquisitions, each of which has its own origin story, including some that predate Bentley’s founding.
Acquisitions seem to be an integral part of Bentley’s DNA almost by design. After all, MicroStation was architected from an early stage as a platform with APIs and its own development language, MDL, that encouraged developers to extend its capabilities for their specific use cases. Naturally, the teams that developed MicroStation-based applications and built successful businesses on the back of them would at some point see the financial logic of joining forces. Starting in 1995, when Bentley regained its independence from Intergraph, it made a series of acquisitions of developers of MicroStation-based applications, such as Jacobus, HMR, GEOPAK, and Rebis. It also acquired Intergraph’s own civil products InRoads, Interplot, and I/RAS. With its hard-won autonomy, the urgency to establish its own distribution organization led Bentley to acquire some of the value-added resellers and service providers that were MicroStation stalwarts and oftentimes straddled the “last mile” to users, including Armilian, Atlantech, and CADAC.
Acquisitions were also a natural consequence of Bentley’s “commitment to comprehensiveness,” which became especially evident with the 1996 acquisition of Finland-based Opti-Consult, developer of TeamMate, a precursor of ProjectWise. Expanding to “fill white space” adjacent to our offerings brought more value to users who came to trust their account relationship and rely on Bentley’s comprehensive support. From the core of CAD, Bentley would broaden its reach beyond transportation, systematically acquiring products for industrial plant design; water, wastewater, and sanitation network design; building design; structural engineering; and energy and electrical design. In the 2010s, with a growing focus on advancing infrastructure, Bentley sought to extend its reach to the operations and maintenance phases of the asset lifecycle with the acquisition of Enterprise Informatics, whose eB Insight would form the basis for AssetWise; Ivara, which would add asset performance management capabilities; C3global, which would add operational analytics; and ComplyPro, which would add systems-engineering progressive assurance.
The 2018 acquisition of Synchro would add construction sequence modeling and provide a unique 4D simulation capability for infrastructure digital twins. In the 2020s, Bentley pursued infrastructure IoT with the acquisition of sensemetrics, Vista Data Vision, and eagle.io to bring digital twins to life with sensor data. Moreover, to demonstrate the business case for digital integrators, Bentley established Cohesive, acquiring Cohesive Solutions—followed by PCSG, SRO Solutions, OXplus, Ontracks, MaximoCon, and Vetasi—to form an international services powerhouse for infrastructure asset management. Frequent “programmatic” acquisitions contributed to the company’s growth rate over the years.
Post-IPO, Bentley was in a position to make even bolder moves with “platform acquisitions” that significantly expanded the company’s scope and scale in new directions. In 2021, Bentley acquired geoscience and geotechnology software firm Seequent in a $1 billion deal, to help infrastructure professionals understand ground conditions and mitigate environmental risks, enabling them to model and simulate infrastructure assets in their full context above and below ground.
The following year, Bentley acquired Power Line Systems (PLS), a leader in software for the design of overhead electric power transmission lines, for approximately $700 million, to anchor a new initiative in electricity grid integration, and position the company for the energy transition.
Four decades after its founding and more than 120 acquisitions later, Bentley has filled in a lot of white space and without doubt has the most comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure engineering software. More than a third of colleagues joined Bentley via acquisition. A student of corporate development might ask: what attributes did the acquired companies possess that made them Bentley-compatible? Was there a profile or pattern to those acquisitions? To a large degree it came down to entrepreneurial spirit—the pursuit of opportunity with a “make it happen” attitude—combined with a passion for engineering and a drive to “make it work a little better.” As for profile or pattern, it is interesting to consider the number of acquisitions that originated in academic research and/or featured father-son combinations where “junior” provided the programming talent to turn dad’s ideas into software. Whichever the case, programmatic acquisitions have generated an enduring pipeline of entrepreneurial talent for Bentley and we can readily accept being a banyan tree of entrepreneurs.
Seequent Origin Story
A shared interest in solving medical challenges led a group of Ph.D.s in electrical engineering from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand to collaborate on new scanning methods. One of them, Rick Beatson, published a paper in 1992 describing an algorithm known as FastRBF, which improved upon the radial basis function (RBF), a method for interpolating between unstructured points in 3D space that had been pioneered by British mathematician Michael Powell. In 1995, they formed Applied Research Associates of New Zealand Ltd. (ARANZ) to explore use cases for FastRBF. In 2000, NASA commissioned ARANZ to create a model of the near-earth asteroid Eros using points from detailed scanning undertaken by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft.
Around that time, Jun Cowan, a University of Toronto Ph.D. in structural geology, became aware of the FastRBF algorithm. While consulting at a Western Australian mine, he grew frustrated by the slow pace of geological model preparation. Searching for RBF applications, he came across a paper presented by ARANZ at SIGGRAPH in 2001 and made a cold call. It paid off. ARANZ was able to take the mining field data and produce a compelling output without having to adapt their software toolkit, comprised of two components called Wallace and Gromit (after the characters in the British stop-motion film series). The collaboration resulted in the release of the first version of Leapfrog in December 2003.
ARANZ Geo was formed in 2004 to deliver 3D geological modeling software based on FastRBF, and the world’s first implicit geological domain models were created. Traditionally, mining had used an explicit approach akin to CAD drawing—which was problematic because the natural environment does not conform to straight lines. Implicit modeling transforms data into a model by way of a set of mathematical functions. The approach allows geologists to produce models quickly and efficiently and then adapt them to the needs of end users, be they engineers, managers, or investors. Since ARANZ Geo’s leadership was not sure whether this approach would be accepted, they decided to price the product just below the credit card limit of a typical geologist.
In 2011, Shaun Maloney became CEO, succeeding Dale Alloway. In 2013, ARANZ Geo launched a new workflow-driven product, developed from the ground up on an entirely new code base, with a view to going mainstream in mining. The timing of this bold move was fortuitous as it coincided with the biggest downturn in mining in a generation, which forced the industry to focus on efficiency. Benefitting from the resulting interest in implicit modeling, ARANZ Geo combined global distribution, proximity to mining centers, and pricing on an annual subscription basis to drive breakthrough success. Yet the downturn also highlighted the need to diversify beyond mining, and in 2017 ARANZ Geo rebranded as Seequent with an aspiration to expand broadly into geosciences and geotechnology software, declaring that “a better understanding of the Earth creates a better world for all.”
Two founders of ARANZ holding a 3D printed model of near-earth asteroid Eros, a gift from NASA
In 2021, upon Bentley’s acquisition of Seequent, Graham Grant became CEO. Today Seequent, the Bentley Subsurface Company, provides industry-leading earth modeling, geo-data management, and team collaboration software. When everyone can see the subsurface more clearly, they can make better decisions that benefit people and the planet.
PLS Origin Story
Alain Peyrot, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, had been involved in developing standards for the structural and geometric design of electric power lines for the American Society of Civil Engineers in the 1970s, and wrote a program in Fortran on a mainframe in 1973. He founded Power Line Systems in 1984 as a consulting business serving utility engineers. Peyrot spent years perfecting finite element routines for modeling cable elements and nonlinear structures. These specialized algorithms were ideally suited to systems of cables such as transmission lines and communication masts. During this period, Peyrot’s teenage son Eric would set aside his skateboard and program the algorithms on his Apple computer. The power and simplicity of these programs quickly earned PLS a reputation as a leader in tools for the analysis of transmission lines.
Otto Lynch joined the engineering firm Black and Veatch in 1988 and started using a DOS version of PLS’s TOWER software. Encountering a technical problem one day, he called the number on the back of the manual. Peyrot answered the phone. Lynch was stunned to have reached PLS’s founder. “Here I am, a 23-year-old engineer straight out of college and I’m on the phone with Dr. Peyrot,” he recalled. “I’m shaking!” In the late 1980s and early 1990s at Black and Veatch, Lynch developed a strong relationship with Peyrot and would tell him what he needed as a consultant. “Through that I got to know Eric,” Lynch said, “and he ended up my best friend, almost like a brother. We would sit on lawn chairs at the end of the driveway with our notebook computers, being geeks.”
Throughout the 1990s Alain Peyrot expanded what used to be TOWER to encompass overhead line design, so rather than looking merely at individual structures, the software looked at the whole model. In 2000, when Lynch was contemplating leaving Black and Veatch, he asked Peyrot to be a reference and was surprised by his response: “No, no, no.” Taken aback, Lynch asked why not. “Because I want you to work for me.” Otto Lynch joined PLS in 2000 and became CEO in 2018. Alain Peyrot retired in 2006 and private equity firm TA Associates bought out Eric in 2018. In November 2021, Bentley Systems acquired Power Line Systems from TA Associates.
Power Line Systems provides the industry standard PLS-CADD, PLS-POLE, and TOWER software for the design and analysis of overhead electric power transmission, distribution, and communication lines and their structures, used by more than 1,800 organizations in more than 130 countries, including the 10 largest utilities.
Otto Lynch, left, and Alain Peyrot
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End notes
Lawton, George. “A legacy built on 40 years of trust - learnings from Greg Bentley as he steps down as CEO of Bentley Systems,” Diginomica.com, Mar. 25, 2024. Link
Bentley 2014 Annual Report.
Day, M. & Corke, G. “Bentley on Digital Twins,” AEC Magazine, Nov/Dec 2019, pp. 26-29.
Lawton, George. “How Singapore created the first country-scale digital twin,” Venturebeat.com, Feb. 23, 2022. Link ; Day, M. & Corke, G. “Bentley on Digital Twins,” AEC Magazine, Nov/Dec 2019, pp. 26-29.
Year in Infrastructure 2020.
Lawton, George. “A legacy built on 40 years of trust - learnings from Greg Bentley as he steps down as CEO of Bentley Systems,” Diginomica.com, Mar. 25, 2024. Link
“Discussing Digital Twins,” AEC Magazine, Jan/Feb 2020, p.36.
“Discussing Digital Twins,” AEC Magazine, Jan/Feb 2020, p. 36.
2018 Bentley Systems Corporate Update.
Secret Sauce