Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced an expansion of its strategic relationship with Microsoft Corporation. Through its commitment to the Microsoft Azure Platform partner program, Bentley is bringing a broad range of Azure-cloud-based services for sustaining infrastructure to architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) worldwide at an accelerated pace. Initial offerings on Azure will include the new Bentley Transmittal Services, enabling AECO organizations to accurately and securely package, and deliver, receive, and track transmittals through a dashboard portal. These shared services will benefit the users of both the ProjectWise collaboration platform and the AssetWise platform for operations information modeling by reducing risk, saving time, and providing greater visibility into project status.
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft, said, “Bentley Systems is one of our preferred partners in the delivery of software and services through the Windows Azure platform to the AECO community. Together, Microsoft and Bentley are serving the needs of our joint customers by offering a cloud strategy that encompasses private and public clouds and on-premise deployments. We have seen how this highly effective approach is driving greater efficiencies for these organizations and helping their businesses become even more successful.”
Bhupinder Singh, senior vice president, Bentley Software, said, “Most of our users have invested significant resources on manual processes or enterprise systems to handle the crucial task of managing transmittals and submittals. Unfortunately, most generic approaches aren’t well suited for this infrastructure project need. Bentley Transmittal Services streamlines and automates this critical business process, enabling users to reliably access and include in the transmittal the correct versions of design content, transformed as appropriate. And, because transmittals need to flow across organizations and their firewalls, our users will find our cloud implementation to be a natural solution.
“Bentley’s ProjectWise is the system in which major AECO organizations create and entrust their work products. Further, at Bentley we are uniquely positioned todeliver (through i-models) and secure (through ProjectWise and AssetWise) information mobility for AECO content. Therefore, extending the scope of ProjectWise and AssetWise through Bentley Transmittal Services constitutes a vital milestone for Bentley and our user organizations in minimizing risks within AECO workflows. Accomplishing this through the Azure cloud is a winning scenario for Bentley, Microsoft, and, most importantly, for our user organizations.”
Said Stuart Nicholson, I.T. and work systems specialist, Halcrow Group Limited, “Bentley Transmittals is an exciting new development that promises to close the gap on the delivery and review of documents and design content.”
Bentley Transmittal Servicesincludes a dashboard that provides notifications and links to a secure transmittal portal where organizations can see all the transmittals that pertain to their projects. Users will have the option to deploy the portal onsite or online and connect with their existing ProjectWise or AssetWise implementations. The same dashboard serves as a transmittal registry, which records all acknowledgements and tracks all status changes.
Bentley Transmittal Services will include the following functionality:
– Transmittal creation and publishing – to create a transmittal package directly from the engineering data source, and send email notifications to external recipients;
– Transmittal delivery and response – to view a transmittal package, acknowledge and download the package, and respond with decisions, text comments, markups, and attachments, all through a portal;
– Transmittal response tracking and status – to view responses per recipient to find out who has not yet acknowledged/responded, to send reminders as email notifications about due/overdue acknowledgements or responses to external recipients, and to show in which transmittal and/or submittal packages a specific work-in-progress document was included.
Availability
Bentley Transmittal Services is currently available onsite with AssetWise. Bentley Transmittal Services for ProjectWise is available onsite today through Bentley’s early adopter program and will be commercially released in Q1 2012. In addition, Bentley Transmittal Services for the Microsoft Azure platform will be available online in 2012. Bentley Transmittal Services online can (and often will) be configured with ProjectWise and/or AssetWise onsite.
About Be Inspired: Thought Leadership in Infrastructure
The world’s leading practitioners have gathered this week at Be Inspired, Bentley’s premier thought leadership and networking event, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. They will share the best practices behind the successful realization of their current projects and explore new ways to respond to the challenges driving today’s business. Also in attendance are 80 journalists from around the world, who additionally participated in a special media briefing on November 7.
Be Inspiredis an intimate, invitation-only event featuring presentations by the Be Inspired Awards finalists as well as executive roundtables focusing on critical issues in business, technology, and practice facing infrastructure professionals around the world. It culminates with an awards ceremony recognizing outstanding achievement and innovation in infrastructure design, construction, and operations by winners selected from 57 project finalists by five independent panels of jurors. In total, nominations from 270 organizations in 42 countries were submitted in this year’s awards program.
This annual event provides a unique forum for senior-level executives to learn about the innovations driving the development and operations of the world’s top infrastructure projects. It also enables them to engage with other industry leaders in interactive discussions on topics of importance to the business of sustaining infrastructure.