Bentley acquires Pointools, Formsys, announces partnerships at Be Inspired

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Exton, Pa.-based AEC Software manufacturer Bentley Systems announced last week that it has completed its acquisitions of Pointools, Ltd., a Greater London-based manufacturer of point cloud technology, and FormSys, a Perth, Australia-based developer of 3D structural, offshore and maritime engineering software.

Both announcements were made at Bentley’s Be Inspired Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Bentley also made several partnership announcements with collaboration and PDF software manufacturers Adobe Systems and Bluebeam Software and a cloud partnership with Microsoft.

Bentley SVP Bhupinder Singh compared the acquisition of Pointools to the company’s purchase of HMR 10 years ago and said that “We see a similar trajectory for Pointools technology and people. Point clouds are becoming pervasive.”

Singh promised Pointools’ technology would be integrated into Bentley’s major products; MicroStation for design, ProjectWise for project data management, Descartes for project and network/infrastructure raster visualization, and Navigator for model viewing and collaboration.

“We look forward to enabling our users to benefit from the growing potential value of point clouds captured by ever-advancing scanning technology,” CEO Greg Bentley said. “Going forward, point-clouds need no longer be throw-aways, and owner-operators can be supported by as-operated 3D models.”

In a preview of what Bentley intends to offer users, point cloud data was shown streaming into a Navigator view, running on a separate thread from other project data. Greg Bentley said his company intends to continue to offer Pointools products and services to existing customers and pledged to keep its products and services platform agnostic. Bentley has been using Pointools Vortex engine for point cloud information since it signed a continuous technology transfer agreement with the company in 2009. The announcement means more integration of the Vortex engine in other Bentley products is likely.

Greg Bentley said the FormSys acquisition will further his company’s offerings for the design and analysis of floating structures.

“We are nowhere near the point of diminishing returns in engineering software for better performing offshore structures,” he said. “… We are mindful that offshore makes up 70% of the Earth’s surface and we’d like to contribute even more toward its vital role in sustaining infrastructure.”

The new agreements with Adobe and Bluebeam will allow users to create i-model enabled PDFs that allow them to easily share information-rich 3D model information inside a PDF. An i-model is file container for 3D model information. The agreement with Adobe will allow Bentley to incorporate digital rights management capabilities in Bentley programs such as Projectwise and Assetwise to allow for more secure management of AEC companies’ intellectual property including transmittals, project records and contract and other documents shared by stakeholders. Bentley has also developed i-model plug-ins for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader that are available on Bentley’s iWare site to create and support i-model enabled PDFs. They will be available later this year.

The Bluebeam agreement builds on existing capabilities to redline Projectwise information in Bluebeam PDF Revu. Now, users will be able to synchronize their markups and redlines back to the original design application, such as Microstation or any other design software.