Industrial Automation Magazine India

Bentley Systems announces the acquisition of GroupBC, UK

Published on : Friday 13-03-2020

GroupBC is UK Leader in Cloud Services for Construction Information Management; Advancing Project and Asset Common Data Environments (CDEs) through Digital Twins.

 

March 12, 2020 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading global provider of comprehensive software and digital twins services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure, has announced the acquisition of GroupBC, a leading UK SaaS software innovator. For over twenty years, GroupBC’s and Bentley’s software solutions have been deployed for complementary purposes to improve project and asset information management. The transaction results from GroupBC’s expansion agenda, and Bentley’s investment appetite, for international growth opportunities stemming from the UK’s national initiatives for major infrastructure investment and towards infrastructure digital twins.

 

GroupBC’s CDE solutions, BC Projects and BC Enterprise+, have been widely applied in the UK for information management respectively across construction and asset estates. Largely due to the UK’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 UK’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 #1 worldwide. The new opportunity is to build on ISO 19650, and GroupBC’s UK 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.

 

Keith Bentley, Chief Technology Officer for Bentley Systems, said, “Our iTwin cloud services, taking advantage of iModel-based solutions for interoperability, are ideal for federating CDEs. 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 UK’s demanding but welcome expectations for new ROI breakthroughs from digital twins.”