I had a chance at the end of last year to have a virtual interview with Ed Mueller, Chief Marketing Officer of Bentley Systems. It was in the form of questions and answers via email.
Here you go…
How do you think CAD technology will impact the nation’s infrastructure in 2009? How is Bentley poised to provide this?
Information modeling will still be the means used to design our nation’s infrastructure in 2009, much as it was in 2008. At Bentley, however, we believe that this technology can do a lot more in 2009, thanks to V8i. The result will be better-performing projects, delivering better-performing assets, while consuming the fewest nonrenewable resources.
So, for instance, the V8i products that make up Bentley’s buildings solution will enable designers to use applications not just to draft buildings, but to design the site with civil engineering software, analyze its energy performance and structural integrity, and perform construction scheduling without leaving the V8i environment. This, of course, contributes greatly to better-performing infrastructure.
The V8i portfolio also supports integrated project delivery, in which the deliverable is much more than paper drawings. Information created during the planning and design phases is reused throughout the project and during the operation and maintenance of the infrastructure. A stumbling block to this reuse of data has been that various disciplines in the project lifecycle require data in different formats, scoping, and level of detail. The interoperability platform in V8i lets practitioners of each discipline persist, share, and visualize infrastructure asset data in a common way leading to better-performing projects.
Many of us have been using CAD tools for quite some time. What are the core capabilities of Microstation V8i for your users?
Our comprehensive V8i software portfolio offers infrastructure professionals streamlined workflows among multiple disciplines and across project teams. It provides software products for all of the solution communities Bentley serves, including roads, bridges, rail and transit, campuses, factories, buildings, power generation, mining and metals, oil and gas, water and wastewater, electric and gas utilities, communications, and cadastre and land development. As a result, V8i features the breadth and depth of technology needed for fully integrated project delivery throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.
V8i delivers the most comprehensive suite of software products ever assembled in a single release. It does this by leveraging and extending core capabilities that are available to all of the applications in the portfolio. V8i gives users choices that address the many challenges faced by professionals from multiple disciplines working on a wide range of infrastructure projects.
The core capabilities include intuitive design modeling, which lets users seamlessly transition from conceptual modeling and visualization to fully complete architectural and engineering models in a single environment. Conceptual tools make it easier to intuitively sculpt solids and surfaces. Generative tools make it easier to iterate through many design alternatives.
Through the flexibility of this powerful toolset, infrastructure professionals can explore and embrace innovations in a more timely fashion to improve the performance of the projects and assets their teams deliver.
Additionally, our new Luxology rendering engine incorporated in the MicroStation product and all MicroStation-based applications provides near-real-time rendering in the design application. This saves time and improves the quality of rendered images for stakeholder review and buy-in.
V8i also includes dynamic views that make working in 3D much more interactive and more informative. With interactive dynamic views, V8i leapfrogs current approaches to solving the problem of drawing coordination. It does this by actively supporting the workflows of distributed multidisciplinary teams all working on the same project to deliver concurrent integrated documentation packages.
But V8i goes one step further by helping users simplify the 3D model creation process. Using something called “display sets,” V8i users can easily change the way different parts of the same 3D model are displayed in the same working view to interactively visualize and resymbolize 2D and 3D designs in real time. This means that teams can quickly improve the quality of integrated documentation packages and reduce the time spent creating 3D models and preparing and coordinating 2D documentation.
V8i’s intrinsic geo-coordination capability lets users coordinate information spatially from many sources using common coordinate systems. Users can locate files spatially with real-world context in ProjectWise for content management or in Google Earth for visual review.
By using V8i, infrastructure teams save time coordinating information from many sources, improve the quality and reliability of information leveraged by other practitioners, and reduce the risk of errors on site arising from poorly coordinated data.
V8i’s incredible project performance lets users work faster and collaborate more effectively to make the process of work sharing across multiple, distributed offices easy and efficient, even for the world’s largest infrastructure projects.
With Delta File Transfer (DFT), V8i solves the “big file” problem that traditionally slows productivity across distributed project teams. Transferring only changes to files, DFT makes ProjectWise V8i the killer app for project team collaboration – with 10x performance gains being the norm for average file sizes.
And with full read/write integration between ProjectWise V8i and Microsoft SharePoint, any project team member can quickly find project information stored in many different systems using a single web browser interface.
Lastly, the V8i software portfolio includes an interoperability platform to persist, share, and visualize infrastructure asset data in a common way. This enables practitioners to reuse project and asset information throughout the infrastructure lifecycle while reducing data translation costs, limiting project rework, and creating better-performing assets.