LONDON----Bentley Systems, Incorporated today announced that BE Conference 2007, which took place 29 April-3 May at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California, and BE Conference Europe, being held this week in the Hilton London Metropole, attracted a combined total of more than 3000 attendees. Moreover, though attendee evaluations have yet to be tallied for BE Conference Europe, BE Conference 2007 maintained the 99 percent attendee satisfaction rating achieved at the 2004, 2005, and 2006 BE Conferences.

Said Cambashi Principal Consultant Edwin Ecob, who served as a 2007 BE Awards of Excellence juror, “For me, the two key themes of the event were ‘learning’ and ‘innovation.’ Learning ranged from formal training classes to peer-to-peer sharing of project and process innovations among Bentley users. Innovation was captured in technology sessions and user projects. These two themes were also covered in the large number of projects that were submitted for BE Awards. As always, the winners received enthusiastic support at the awards dinner.

“One particularly successful Bentley innovation at BE Conference 2007 was the inaugural BE Executive Symposium, during which Bentley senior executives, industry leaders, and academics discussed sustaining both the physical and professional infrastructure – focusing on the shortage of skilled professionals.

“BE 2007 was a success. I’m looking forward to 2008.”

On Monday at both conferences, attendees were introduced to a number of innovations, including:

--  The ProjectWise Passport - This versatile and global collaboration
    license for users of Bentley's ProjectWise scalable collaboration
    system is portable between projects. With just one ProjectWise
    Passport, a user is now licensed for any ProjectWise client,
    including ProjectWise StartPoint, ProjectWise Navigator,
    ProjectWise Explorer, and ProjectWise InterPlot Organizer.

--  Managed Solutions from Bentley Professional Services - These
    include SELECT Server ONLINE and ProjectWise ONLINE, Resident
    Engineers, and Operational Resourcing.

    SELECT Server ONLINE and ProjectWise ONLINE will be delivered to
    organizations as a service in order to streamline the
    implementation and maintenance of a managed environment. These
    solutions are ideal for joint-venture projects and midsize firms
    that prefer to focus on their core competencies.

    Resident Engineers will provide special and regular professional
    services. The engineers will be stationed at a site as an integral
    team member and serve as an addition to the user's IT operations.

    Operational Resourcing will address the peaks and troughs of an
    organization's need for off-site or on-site professional services.
    This solution will supplement an organization's own server
    operations staff and technical applications management, or
    backfill other operational staff as required.

--  Bentley's Applied Research group - This new group identifies and
    applies technologies sourced elsewhere to enrich the
    comprehensiveness of Bentley's solutions.

Attendees also were briefed on Bentley’s April 2007 Annual Report. Highlights include:

--  2006 revenues increased to $389 million, representing growth of
    more than 15 percent from 2005

--  Since 1995, the company has reinvested over $500 million into
    research and development and over $250 million into acquisitions

--  Bentley's Enterprise License Subscription program now includes
    more than 100 of the largest infrastructure entities in the world

--  Bentley colleagues worldwide now number nearly 2500

Executive Keynotes

The Monday morning sessions in both Los Angeles and London began the learning process with inspiring and informative keynote presentations by Bentley executives. After brief welcome remarks by COO Malcolm Walter, CEO Greg Bentley took the dais to argue that increased economic productivity is the only way to meet the growing workload of infrastructure professionals.

Mr. Bentley said that the backlog of infrastructure work is growing. On top of “ordinary” improvement and retrofit work in developed countries and basic infrastructure needs in developing regions, infrastructure professionals face pressing “extraordinary” sustainability challenges, including natural resource self-sufficiency and natural disaster resilience.

Making these tasks all the more challenging, said Mr. Bentley, is today’s shortage of engineering resources. Given the years of training required to become a productive infrastructure practitioner, there is no quick fix for the comparatively low rate of new entrants joining engineering professions.

Mr. Bentley said the solution to these challenges is to dramatically increase economic productivity for architectural and engineering services, which according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics USBLS has substantially lagged behind the economy at large since the mid 1990s. He added that data from the most recent years reported by USBLS indicate an inflection upward, which he believes reflects some successful adoption of IT-enabled workflow innovations such as those represented by the BE Award nominations and others presented in BE Conference best practices sessions. He explained that further gains can best be achieved by prioritizing learning, extending collaboration, and fostering organic innovation.

He next presented a “tour” of BE Award nominations and other Bentley user projects that have benefited from five key strategies for economic productivity: software interoperation, accelerated delivery of assets, higher-quality deliverables that are reusable, the delivery of assets with better performance and better fit for purpose, and business model innovations.

Mr. Bentley concluded with a look at innovations in Bentley System’s business model that are helping to support distributed enterprises and improve their economic productivity. In addition, he discussed some of Bentley’s key performance metrics.

Bhupinder Singh, senior vice president, Bentley Software, then spoke on increasing productivity from a product perspective. He explained that Bentley’s “one platform” consisting of MicroStation and ProjectWise allows the company’s developers to achieve faster time to market for applications, intrinsic integration of Bentley products, a common user experience, and consistent application behavior.

As an example, he demonstrated the new ProjectWise Navigator, the first visual collaboration client for design review and analysis plus work packaging that fully supports iterative workflows and reuse of all content throughout the process. ProjectWise Navigator includes many innovations by MicroStation to provide support for a broad range of applications, industry standards, and file formats. Some of the 2D/3D file formats and supported applications include DGN, DWG, PDF, AutoPLANT, TriForma, PlantSpace, PDS, Google SketchUp, Google Earth^™, IGES, STEP, JPEG, TIFF, and 3DS.

Singh also discussed the company’s concentration on complete solutions for the civil, building, plant, and geospatial verticals. These solutions bundle relevant products, address data integration, and focus on the design, build, and operations workflows of infrastructure asset classes. Examples include solutions for road or rail networks, power plants and utilities, and water networks.

Next, Singh described technology added to Bentley’s comprehensive portfolio through the acquisition of the following companies:

--  C.W. Beilfuss & Associates - provider of software for permit
    administration and safe routing of oversize and overweight
    vehicles called SUPERLOAD and the multi-state permitting Web site
    "gotpermits.com."

--  Design Power - provider of Design++, a knowledge-based engineering
    solver on which PlantWise is based. PlantWise uses Design++ with a
    proven, versatile, and extensible rulebase to enable fully piped
    and lowest-cost 3D plant concept models to be easily created for
    contextual optimization.

--  KIWI Software - provider of ProSteel 3D, a globally recognized
    solution for structural steel detailing and fabrication that
    supports multiple platforms.

Finally, Singh, accompanied by Bentley Software colleagues Rob Whitesell, vice president Building and Plant Products, Shaun Sewall, vice president Platform Products and Technology, and Styli Camateros, vice president Civil and Geospatial Products, looked ahead to the next edition of Bentley products, code-named “Athens.” This edition will include innovations such as conceptual design including GenerativeComponents, dynamic views, distributed projects, and geo-coordination. Singh stressed that, as it always has, Bentley would add innovations incrementally across all its applications, providing users with a road map of continuous improvement to more powerful technology and greater productivity.

Singh was followed by CTO Keith Bentley. Mr. Bentley began by explaining that Bentley’s one-platform approach enables the company to expand its application reach in the marketplace, to better leverage its research and development and testing resources, and to facilitate product innovation among its developers. In addition, users benefit from:

--  The ability to reuse software training as they move from
    application to application

--  A breadth of solutions

--  Software intra-operability

--  Continuity and predictability of applications

--  File format/data longevity

--  Software sustainability

Looking at future innovations in Bentley software, Mr. Bentley said the company is working on new techniques to expand the capability of DGN files, which today may contain a gigabyte of data. Another goal is to enable DGN files to hold thousands of models, which will enable remarkable new capabilities in MicroStation “Athens.” Also, in an approach analogous to increasing processing power with parallel processing by CPUs, the company is working on distributed DGNs, which will increase the productivity of its users.

Ultimately, Mr. Bentley predicted, the dynamic nature of MicroStation output will lead to more deliverables that are dynamic, rather than static files or paper. In addition, the company is investigating multiple users working with the same model using peer-to-peer sessions.

In his opening remarks, Buddy Cleveland, senior vice president, Applied Research, explained that while Bentley has always invested in research, much of it was product- focused and, therefore, “subject to fairly short time horizons.” He said that the new Bentley Applied Research group will work beyond the horizon to “work the future.”

Cleveland said that the new group will focus on applied research so its work is always relevant to the needs of Bentley users, and the research will be done in much the same way users change the world – “one project at a time.” Moreover, it will include partnering with universities such as Johns Hopkins, McGill, Polytechnic, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Virginia Tech.

The Applied Research group, he continued, will work on three types of projects:

--  Software that implements new capabilities in existing areas or
    provides capabilities in totally new areas, with one example being
    GenerativeComponents

--  The incorporation of new technology into existing Bentley
    products, such as dynamic pen and dynamic plot and their
    integration with ProjectWise to communicate, capture, and
    vectorize ink-markups, query the ProjectWise database for
    provenance, and automatically attach vector references to the
    originals, stored in ProjectWise, for reuse

--  The application of existing products to new areas - for example,
    prototyping a general framework for real-time assets and providing
    capabilities for managing and accessing those devices using
    ProjectWise

Malcolm Walter concluded the Monday morning keynotes at BE Conference 2007 and will be the sole keynoter tomorrow at BE Conference Europe. Walter opened his remarks at BE Conference 2007 by noting the sustainability challenges facing the world in the coming decades and called upon the audience to use innovation to become the “greenest generation.”

He then recognized four projects as the first-ever recipients of the BE Award for “best return on innovation” and presented each as a case study:

--  The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet portion of the massive Ohio
    River Bridges Project entails the construction of two bridges,
    will take 17 years to complete at a cost of $2.5 billion, and will
    involve hundreds of engineering firms and contractors. The
    Kentucky Transportation Cabinet is using ProjectWise for
    successful collaboration among most organizations on the project.
    One innovation that delivered remarkable results was the division
    of the work on a complex interchange known as "Spaghetti Junction"
    - not by sections of the roadwork, but rather by core competencies
    of the firms doing the work. ProjectWise allowed them to match
    expertise to need and perform work simultaneously. In document
    access alone, reported time savings were in the range of 30
    percent. Cost savings, based on the total engineering hours
    forecasted for the project, could reach $9 million or more.

--  The Dutch Ministry of Finance's project involved the integration
    of SAP R/3 Real Estate data with GIS parcel data created and
    stored in Bentley's Geospatial Server. By fully automating the
    process of data acquisition, maintenance, and publishing, and by
    ending manual and paper-based internal processes, the State
    Property Service has become much more efficient in managing the
    largest property portfolio in the Netherlands. Sabastiaan
    Sintemaartensdijk, of the State Property Service, attributed
    increased revenue of $20 million to the Bentley-enabled system, a
    1600 percent return on innovation.

--  GHAFARI Associates, an AE firm based in Michigan, achieved
    significant return on innovation with Building Information
    Modeling BIM. The company's mission statement includes the goal
    of enhancing its competitive advantage "by using the latest
    technology tools to improve its product quality and
    effectiveness." Through the use of BIM, projects for General
    Motors were delivered 26 percent faster with less waste, less
    scrap, fewer RFIs, and fewer changes due to interferences.
    GHAFARI's BIM expertise also helped it win 3D integration work on
    a Marriott hotel project, so its return on innovation included a
    new client and a growing practice.

--  Bechtel Corporation, one of the world's premier engineering,
    construction, and project management companies, is using Bentley's
    ProjectWise system to collaborate on Reliance's Jamnagar Export
    Refinery Project JERP in India. In both scope and complexity,
    the project rivals many of Bechtel's previous exceptional
    accomplishments, including Hoover Dam, the Channel Tunnel, and the
    Trans-Alaska Pipeline. JERP has a plot plan bigger than that of
    London and a target completion time of less than 36 months.

    Bechtel is tackling this megaproject using engineering resources
    dispersed around the globe. Nearly 1000 users in nine locations
    are employing ProjectWise to ensure that more than 50,000 drawings
    are available to the correct discipline at the correct location.
    With ProjectWise, the drawings can be worked on collaboratively,
    enabling designers in one location to view the results of design
    teams in other offices almost immediately. This means Bechtel can
    rapidly distribute the project work to the different locations in
    a much more granular way - by unit, by discipline, and even by
    drawing - as the needs of the project dictate.

    A key advantage realized by the project team is the ability to
    search for and find all files that were changed in the last week,
    and to cross reference the location of the files found with the
    location of the person who last changed them. This enables the
    JERP team to regularly reassess and redistribute their project
    content, optimizing productivity and reducing network traffic.

Last night, during the BE Awards of Excellence dinner at BE Conference Europe, Walter also presented a BE Award for best return on innovation to MARTA the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. Serving a population of more than 1.5 million, MARTA is the ninth largest transit system in the United States. The organization’s Track and Structures group maintains its mainline track, rail yards, transit stations, and thousands of assets.

In October of last year, MARTA began relying on Bentley’s Optram solution for rail condition analysis and planning. The system interoperates directly with MARTA’s enterprise asset management system to automatically generate work orders and capture progress, history, and cost information for reuse in future decision making. As a result of this implementation, MARTA has already shown a 71 percent reduction in the time it takes to analyze rail condition data and verify problem areas. With the ability to practice proactive maintenance, MARTA Track and Structures foresees dramatic reductions in maintenance and renewal costs, as well as track defects.

To view videos of all of the keynotes at BE Conference 2007 and BE Conference Europe, go to www.be.org.

BE Executive Symposium

The BE Executive Symposium at BE Conference 2007 was an invitation-only event that connected industry executives with researchers to discuss and address key challenges to improving the world’s infrastructure. The inaugural symposium focused on sustaining infrastructure in the face of today’s critical shortage of engineering resources. In attendance were C-level and VP-level executives, company and project directors, research leaders from universities including Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Virginia Tech, and editors from leading AEC and geospatial publications.

Geospatial Research Seminar

Yesterday afternoon at BE Conference Europe, Bentley hosted a half-day Geospatial Research Seminar. The seminar, which has been held annually the past four years, was once again organized by Delft University of Technology, OTB, Section GIS-Technology, and Bentley. The theme was “Creating Spatial Information Infrastructures.”

Other BE Conference Sessions

Also among the combined total of more than 1100 BE Conference information-rich sessions in Los Angeles and London were:

--  Vertical Keynotes - Vertical-specific keynotes were made by Gabe
    Norona, senior vice president Civil and Geospatial Solutions;
    Styli Camateros, vice president Civil and Geospatial Products; Rob
    Whitesell, vice president Building and Plant Products; and Huw
    Roberts, global marketing director, Bentley Building.

--  Best Practices - More than 175 sessions were presented on the best
    application of technology from experienced peers and technology
    experts. Past BE Conference attendees have always rated the best
    practices sessions, which often include suggestions on ways to
    leverage technology to increase productivity, as extremely useful
    for their projects and their careers.

--  New Technology - More than 170 sessions direct from Bentley
    developers and product managers on the newest products were
    presented by Bentley Software. Two examples include Bentley
    Electric XM and Bentley Expert Designer XM, which support a new
    level of efficiency in managing electric distribution networks
    throughout the plan, design, build, and operations lifecycle.

--  Professional Training - More than 30,000 learning units of
    professional training in more than 470 courses were provided by
    Bentley Institute.

--  Networking - Numerous opportunities to network and socialize with
    peers and friends were available at special events, including the
    BE Awards of Excellence ceremony and a Hollywood tour for Bentley
    Institute five-star learning achievers in Los Angeles, and a
    dinner in London recognizing the BE Award winners and Golden KIWI
    award winners, as well as a cruise on the River Thames for
    five-star learning achievers.

To review all the sessions offered at BE Conference 2007 and BE Conference Europe, go to www.be.org.

2007 BE Awards of Excellence

The annual BE Awards of Excellence, which honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world’s infrastructure, were a high point of BE Conference 2007. These projects set benchmarks and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them.

This year’s BE Awards of Excellence ceremony showcased projects from more than 230 organizations from around the world. More than 235 nominations were recognized and 31 winners were honored in the professional portion of the program, and 44 nominees were recognized and four winners were honored in the academic portion. In addition, a BE Award was presented to the Educator of the Year. The winners were selected by an independent panel of BE Awards jurors, which included accomplished Bentley users and distinguished industry experts.

Said Martyn Day, publishing editor, MCAD Magazine and AEC Magazine, and 2007 BE Awards juror, “It’s easy to claim that the awards are Bentley rewarding good customers, but having been a part of the jury process several times, I can assure you that the BE Awards of Excellence are treated very seriously and independently when we sit to judge. Each project and material submitted is hotly debated and the standard this year was incredibly high.

“As a CAD journalist, it’s great to see so many large-scale projects completed in 3D, with all the benefits documented, as well as how problems that arose were solved. We take infrastructure for granted every day. Few think about the freeways, railways, buildings, and factories, and how they were designed. These are all mammoth tasks, requiring coordinated and dedicated teams of engineers. The awards are about recognizing their amazing efforts that literally enable us to go about our daily lives.”

The winners were announced during a dinner and ceremony hosted by Peter Sagal of the National Public Radio program “Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!” and co-sponsored by McGraw-Hill Construction, publisher of Engineering News-Record.

For more information on the 2007 BE Awards of Excellence winners and nominations, go to www.be.org/awards. To view a video of the 2007 BE Awards of Excellence ceremony, go to www.be.org.

Bentley Institute

Bentley Institute’s strong presence at this year’s BE Conferences included the Star Program www.bentley.com/starprogram, distance learning www.bentley.com/distancelearning, and Bentley LEARN www.bentley.com/learn, along with all of the other learning sessions. In the exhibit hall, users experienced live instructor-led distance learning through courses that were simulcast from classroom sessions via the Internet. In addition, hundreds of users took advantage of Bentley LEARN Cafés to test drive Bentley LEARN OnDemand eLearning.

The Bentley Institute Press www.bentley.com/books built upon the great success of its exhibit hall presence last year by offering the second annual Bentley Bookstore. Users were able to browse and purchase new books for the infrastructure profession including Peter Smith’s “The Fundamentals of Piping Design,” “The Haestad Methods Water Resources Modeling Collection,” Jerry Flynn’s “Animating With MicroStation,” and G.V. Krishnan’s “Harnessing MicroStation V8 XM Edition.”

Exhibits

Attendees at both BE Conferences this year had ample opportunity to peruse the exhibit hall aisles for products and services to help support their infrastructure projects. On display were offerings from Bentley as well as from a broad range of companies that service the infrastructure software community.

BE Conference Sponsors

BE Conference 2007 and BE Conference Europe sponsors include:

--  Platinum - HP

--  Gold - Adobe Systems, McGraw-Hill, Microsoft, Oce

--  Silver - Beck Technology, CADsmart, Cadventure, Forum 8, Legion,
    Leica Geosystems

--  Bronze - Advanced Micro Devices, ASD, COMIT, ConnectPress,
    GeoConnexion Magazine, GeoInformatics Magazine, International Red
    Cross, Leica Geosystems, Matrox Graphics, MEKON, Norconsult
    Informasjonssystemer A/S, Simtra AeroTech AB, and Trimble

BE Conference Attendees

BE Conference attendees came to the Los Angeles Convention Center and Hilton London Metropole from AE firms; architecture firms; design-build firms; engineering consultants; facility owner-operators; departments of transportation DOTs and transportation ministries; rail companies; site engineering firms; communications and utilities firms; national governments and associated contractors; local governments; cadastral authorities; public works agencies; plant engineering, procurement, and construction EPC contractors; and plant owner-operators. They included users of Bentley’s MicroStation, ProjectWise, AutoPLANT, Haestad Methods, STAAD, and RAM solutions, among others.

About BE and the BE Conference

BE, which stands for “Bentley Empowered,” embodies the power of community to create, innovate, and improve the world’s infrastructure.

The BE Conference, which consistently scores a 99 percent attendee satisfaction rating, is a once-a-year learning opportunity for Bentley user organizations offering professional training, technology updates, keynotes, and best practice sharing. At these sessions, attendees better themselves, better their organizations, and better the ways they can improve the world’s infrastructure.

BE Conference 2008 dates and locations will be announced later this summer.

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 2400 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 recent Daratech research study.

To receive Bentley press releases as they are issued, visit www.bentley.com/bentleywire. For more information, visit www.bentley.com. To view a copy of Bentley’s April 2007 Annual Report online, go to www.bentley.com/April2007annualreport.

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