At the BE Inspired Conference (#BeIn2012) this week in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley (pictured at right) opened the media day by blitzing analysts and editors with a barrage of statistics about the market, software successes, economic reality and the introduction of mobile apps for tablets.
"With apps at $.99 do we have a business model that is sustainable?" questioned Bentley. Even though his company offers engineering design solutions built for professional users, Bentley believes that his company sits at the crossroads of product consumerization. He feels that the mobile consumer products like tablets and apps offer an opportunity. "Consumerization is accelerating information mobility," says Bentley.
Hence Bentley wants to develop software for handheld devices that puts data into field workers hands, for example. The company demonstrated Bentley Map running on an Android tablet.
But as a Wharton graduate, Bentley also did not stray far from his roots during his keynote. Bentley reported $534 million in revenues in 2012 (9/30/2012) an increase of $11 million over 2011. Asia continues to be a place where infrastructure professions are very busy. The EMEA index is spotty mostly because Europe has had some headwinds. In the Americas there has been resilience, according to Bentley, but this index includes Latin America where there is more growth than there is in North America.
Bentley’s utilization index shows the millions of hours every week in the usage of the company's software solutions. Globally, 47% of application utilization hours are in building information models (BIM). Civil and geospatial product utilization is good and estimated to be in the high single digits.
The average overall spending per application utilization hour from Engineering News Record's (ENR) top design firms is less than $1.00. Of the ENR top design firms that are Bentley enterprise license subscribers (ELS) spend on average 12% less per application utilization hour. Bentley’s rate of price increase over the last three years has averaged under 1.5% annually and, including discount changes, the net price increase over last three years has averaged only 2.5%.
New ELS subscribers increase their application utilization hours by 59%. Bentley instituted an annual "portfolio balancing" option for users so that there is alignment and no waste of Bentley software applications. Users can trade products of utilization of others is low.
The focus on asset performance is key. No company wants to waste money especially on software that goes underutilized. Bentley's approach toward giving customers metrics on usage provides the foundation for a better partnership between solution provider and user.
Disclosure: Bentley Systems supported travel to the Be Inspired Conference.
