AEC TECH NEWS: Bentley offers Cloud Services Subscription program

London — Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced a new, comprehensive subscription program for cloud-based access to collaboration services and apps, managed services, administration of term licenses, professional services, Bentley Institute LEARNservices, and new CONNECT Edition Cloud Services. With the new Bentley Cloud Services Subscription program, user organizations can subscribe to any or all of these offerings within the framework of a predictable annual budget.

The Bentley Cloud Services Subscription program is designed to be equitable and flexible:

• organizations will set their subscription level to an annual budget that matches their anticipated usage;
• only services actually used will be charged quarterly against the subscription balance; and
• the subscription balance never expires, so when actual usage does not match anticipated usage, any remaining balance rolls forward — there is no “use it or lose it” risk.

Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley said, “Connecting through cloud services is so fundamentally valuable to our users, their projects, and their enterprises that we want to eliminate any commercial deterrent to user organizations’ taking full advantage. As an enterprise user of many cloud services, I think we have worked out how to improve on the vendors’ business models we’ve seen to date. We’re introducing all the benefits of being connected, but with full visibility and accountability for costs, and without headaches or risks to budget. We believe that our Cloud Services Subscription program, like our many commercial innovations that have preceded it, provides our users with the simplest and fairest approach possible.

“Our user organizations will continue their SELECT subscriptions for Bentley software licenses they already own, and our larger accounts will continue with their Enterprise License Subscription at a fixed annual fee. However, our ProjectWise passports, visas, and CONNECT Edition cloud services for collaboration, and our other CONNECT Edition cloud services, will be provided through this new commercial approach so that our incentives directly align with the value users generate from their actual utilization.”

The Cloud Services Subscription is comprehensive. Under this program, project delivery or owner-operator organizations can subscribe to:

• ProjectWise CONNECT Edition as a service, cloud provisioned, on premises, or in hybrid implementations;
• new CONNECT Edition cloud services, including Scenario Services and Catalog Services;
• professional services for Bentley Institute learning and for other implementation and configuration requirements;
• managed services offerings, inclusive of computing resources, software, implementation, and operational support; and
• term-licensed applications for design, analytical, construction, and/or reality modeling.

The Cloud Services Subscription program offers ProjectWise CONNECT Edition as a service and greatly simplifies ProjectWise licensing. With this program, user organizations will no longer need to pay for, limit, or even keep track of ProjectWise servers – as ProjectWise CONNECT Edition fees are only associated with quarterly passport and visa utilization. Access to ProjectWise services begins with a CONNECTIONS Passport, with more advanced services charged through service-specific visas. User organizations can choose managed (hosted) services, on-premises servers, or any combination, in a hybrid environment. Organizations that wish to use on-premises servers have complete flexibility to deploy any number in whatever architecture best suits their requirements, for optimal performance without additional software cost.

ProjectWise CONNECT Edition (CE) extends the scope of ProjectWise from a “behind the firewall” engineering work sharing solution to an enterprise-wide project delivery environment. ProjectWise CE spans the entire project ecosystem, allowing the extended project team to collaboratively participate throughout the project lifecycle.

ProjectWise CE is availed through Bentley CONNECTIONS Passports and service-specific visas, with actual usage for each logged and settled quarterly:

• CONNECTIONS Passport – Provides authenticated access to desktop, Web, and mobile apps, including Navigator;
• Project Collaboration Visa – Adds ProjectWise Design Integration and ProjectWise Deliverables Management capabilities. Project stakeholders can share information and collaborate effectively with the entire project team, including owners, managers, and all other participants;
• Engineering Content Management Visa – Provides organization-wide support of project delivery processes across projects – with support for document control, records management, tag data management, field data management, design configuration management, and project standards. Benefits of these capabilities include controlled management of documents and data, reuse of design knowledge and standards, and propagation of best practices across all projects; and
• Enterprise Visa – Combines the ProjectWise Collaboration and Engineering Content Management Visas.

Among the new CONNECT Edition Cloud Services are Scenario Services and Catalog Services. Scenario Services provides users of Bentley’s analytical modeling applications with access to cloud-based computing power to analyze alternatives and understand and evaluate trade-offs through scenario reporting. The initial analytical modeling applications supported are STAAD and SACS, with more to come. Catalog Services helps project teams manage and deliver access to content. Users can employ Catalog Services to create enterprise-specific, owner-specific, and project-specific catalogs, combining content, specifications, and functional components from Bentley, manufacturers, standards bodies, and more.

In providing commercial access to ProjectWise CONNECT Edition and other CONNECT Edition cloud services, the Bentley Cloud Services Subscription supersedes the notion of “named users.” Organizations will be relieved of the painstaking and impossible task of annually predicting usage requirements for each of their respective users, and escape the inevitable inaccuracies and turnover that result in shelf-ware, underutilized software, or unwarranted fees.

Malcolm Walter, Bentley COO and champion of many of Bentley’s other commercial innovations, said, “It is pretty simple, actually. We have two decades of experience with subscription programs, beginning with our SELECT program. One of the things we’ve learned is that our user organizations want a predictable, annual budget. The other is – and this is perhaps most important of all – they only want to pay for the software and services that they have actually used. Our new Bentley Cloud Services Subscription program hits the mark in each case, enabling our users to take full advantage of all of our collaboration apps and cloud services with no ‘Gotchas!’”

Additional information about Bentley Cloud Services is available at https://www.bentley.com/en/subscriptions/cloud-services-subscription/cloud-services-subscription.