Driving Productivity and Innovation with Bentley & Microsoft
I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Bentley Systems’ Be Together conference held on May 23-26, 2011, at the 
Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, Pa. If you are not familiar with Bentley, they are uniquely dedicated to providing software for the design, construction and operation of the world’s infrastructure. Microsoft has been a long time partner of Bentley helping them evolve their solutions enabling their customers to tackle any design challenge, from the longest bridge to the greenest building. This approach has made Bentley the world leader in the fields of water modeling, roads and transit design, bridge engineering, building energy performance and plant operations. Examples of these solutions include MicroStation, ProjectWise and AssetWise which roll up under its V8i SELECTseries portfolio of multidisciplinary, interoperable software solutions.
My talk was on the opening day keynote with Greg Bentley, CEO, and Bhupinder Singh who is the Senior Vice President of Bentley Software. At the conference Bentley announced that its V8i SELECTseries portfolio of software fully exploits Microsoft Windows 7 functionality. You can read the press release here. I discussed how Bentley had optimized the V8i portfolio to fully leverage the increased performance, enhanced user experience, and improved ability to find and access information that Windows 7 delivers. As a result, Bentley software users can now take advantage of multi-touch interfaces and multiscreen monitors; save time with 3D and faster graphics generation; access information within AEC models for busin
ess uses as live data; view information models from just about anywhere using Microsoft Outlook and Explorer; and much more. You can read about the value of Windows 7 to developers here.
Also, I talked about the deployments of Windows 7. After all, if your company has not deployed Windows 7 for its users it makes it pretty difficult to leverage the power and innovations of V8i. My first point was that in April Windows 7 surpassed Windows XP as the most-used desktop operating system in the United States, according to StatCounter. Plus, every Utility that I talk to in the world is either in the process of deploying Windows 7 or has plans in place to deploy Windows 7 over the next year.
Another part of my talk was why are companies upgrading to Windows 7? With partners like Bentley, Windows 7 is becoming a platform for line of business applications. Plus, our many case studies demonstrate benefits such as the increased productivity, cost savings, improved security, desktop/application virtualization and DirectAccess that simplifies connectivity for mobile users. While Windows XP has served us well, it was designed for another era and with XP’s support nearing an end there is yet another reason to move to Windows 7. The trend is clear, Windows 7 is a great product and corporations are ramping up their deployments.
It was a great conference. Many thanks to Bentley for inviting us to speak and we look forward to our continued work together to bring unparalleled levels of productivity and innovation to those involved in the design, construction, and operations of the world’s infrastructure. – Jon C. Arnold