Bentley Acquires GroupBC

Written by Andrew Corselli
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Photo via Bentley

Bentley Systems, Inc., has acquired GroupBC, a U.K. SaaS software innovator. For more than 20 years, GroupBC and Bentley’s software solutions have been deployed for complementary purposes in an effort to improve project and asset information management.

GroupBC’s CDE solutions, BC Projects and BC Enterprise+ “have been widely applied in the U.K. for information management respectively across construction and asset estates. Largely due to the U.K.’s substantiated ROI experience and its global thought leadership, CDEs have become increasingly availed globally in ‘going digital’ for capital projects and resulting assets. In 2019, the U.K.’s (BS 1192) construction project information management guidelines were largely adopted within the global standard ISO 19650.”

Also in 2019, in its inaugural study of the overall market for Collaborative BIM, ARC Advisory Group ranked Bentley’s ProjectWise system as No.1 worldwide. The new opportunity is to build on ISO 19650, and GroupBC’s U.K. information management experience, to advance collaborative BIM, through “evergreen” digital twins, to span infrastructure lifecycles.

In combination, Bentley’s iTwin Services will now be leveraged to uniquely connect GroupBC CDEs and ProjectWise CDEs. Through semantic alignment and change synchronization, the resulting digital twins cloud services will securely federate—fully enabling 4D mixed reality and analytics visibility—previously separate CDEs for construction and engineering.

“Our iTwin cloud services, taking advantage of iModel-based solutions for interoperability, are ideal for federating CDEs,” said Keith Bentley, Chief Technology Officer, Bentley Systems. “This enables us to assure that the users of our BC SaaS services will benefit from further extending the value of their project and asset information through digital twins. With the help of our new GroupBC colleagues, we will now be able to better serve engineers, contractors and owners by bringing together their collective IT (information management), OT (operational technologies including reality modeling), and ET (engineering models). I am confident that the resulting improvements in project and asset performance will be consistent with the U.K.’s demanding but welcome expectations for new ROI breakthroughs from digital twins.”

“This is a hugely exciting day for our shared accounts and for both our workforces moving forward,” said Sanjeev Shah, co-founder of GroupBC. “The opportunities which arise from bringing our two companies and their respective product portfolios together are enormous, as is the global reach which Bentley can now add for us. Working together we will be even better able to support, through ‘going digital,’ construction and asset lifecycles.”

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