Aidan Mercer, Bentley Systems’ Industry Marketing Director, Architecture, Engineering, Construction, spoke with GISCafe Voice at the Bentley Year in Infrastructure event in Singapore back in October 2017. We discussed the utilities industry, namely waste and wastewater, and how GIS is a part of all the utility applications at Bentley.
Innovation in Government Finalist: Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development, Dholera SIR, Dholera, Gujarat, India
“We don’t talk exclusively about geospatial technology, we talk about it being embedded in our applications,” said Mercer. “We no longer try to prove spatial awareness because it’s inherent in our software. We don’t tend to have any announcements around geospatial because it’s built into our software.”
In discussing waste and wastewater, Mercer said that industry has been predominantly digital for quite some time. The “Going Digital” theme of the conference runs through the different industries that Bentley represents.
Some of these areas such as water and wastewater, hydraulic modeling, calibrating networks, designing treatment plants – have been predominantly digital for quite a long time.
Such aspects as hydraulic modeling, calibrating networks, designing of treatment plants, in their own environment have been digital. The goal of Bentley is to have those applications connect in a connected data environment. “That’s providing the ability for a design application for a hydraulic model application or a centered network the ability to talk to one another,” said Mercer.
“It would be opening up information that would be native to a certain application and making it available to another computer system to make intelligent systems. And that’s why you have things like operation analytics platforms to predict and prescribe those sorts of outcomes. From an overall perspective, that’s continuing the theme of what we’ve been doing as an engineering company, what we would describe as a portfolio of connected applications, built off this Microsoft Azure platform. We’ve been rolling out these applications aggressively because it will take time to bring these applications into these environments. Now we have what we call a more comprehensive portfolio of these products. The Haestad products in particular are available now as a cloud service, great because it’s no longer siloed in this particular environment.”
