Back to newsletter list
|
Bentley’s BE Conference 2008
Towards the end of May, I headed out to Baltimore to attend Bentley’s annual user event, the BE Conference (the “BE” stands for Bentley Empowered). Except for last year’s conference, I have been attending this event every year since 2004, and I find it a terrific opportunity to learn more about Bentley’s products and what its users are doing. This year, the conference had a new format that focused more on user presentations and stories than on training sessions, which made it much more relevant for me as well as to those who attended it to get a better idea of how Bentley solutions were being used. The conference has averaged an attendance of about 2000 in the past few years, and this was true for the 2008 event as well. What was different, however, was the growing international presence—among the attendees, the media, as well as the projects show-cased at the annual BE awards and the user presentations. The company has already diversified from four core verticals—Civil, Building, Plant, and Geospatial—to many more categories, including Bridges, Buildings, Cadastre and Land Development, Campuses, Communications, Electric and Gas Utilities, Factories, Mining and Metals, Oil and Gas, Power Generation, Rail and Transit, Roads, and Water and Wastewater. It has over 100 products in its portfolio, and these are being used on some of the biggest infrastructure projects around the world. Anyone in any doubt about the long-term viability of Bentley’s products would find those doubts laid to rest after attending BE 2008. The next release of the Bentley solutions, supposed to be their biggest ever, also looked very promising, going by the sneak peeks of some of the features that were shared. Each of the different solution areas that Bentley caters to had its own track at the BE conference. I attended the one most relevant to AEC, “BIM and Beyond,” which featured close to 30 concurrent sessions on a wide range of topics including BIM implementation, integrated design and engineering, BIM in construction, sustainable design, interoperability, and next generation facilities management, as well as product overviews of all the Bentley BIM solutions. The highlights of the sessions I attended are captured in this issue of the AECbytes Newsletter, along with the product announcements made at the general sessions, the BE Awards, and some of the relevant products on display at the Exhibit Hall. Article Link http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2008/issue_36.html To provide comments and feedback on this article, or see what others have to say, please visit its AECbytes blog posting.
Copyright (c)2008 Lachmi Khemlani, AECbytes. All rights reserved Thank you for your subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated. To subscribe to AECbytes, visit the AECbytes Subscribe page. To change your e-mail address, send a message to: subscribe@aecbytes.com To ***
from this list, send a blank email to: |
