Already, Bentley has two Apple apps on the site in what it calls "technical preview" mode, which provide iOS access to Bentley Navigator for viewing, searching and manipulating selections of 3D BIM, as well as ProjectWise Explorer, for searching and reviewing other project information. The apps will be "certified for commercial use in January," says Roberts. "With Apple, you can't do a beta," he explained.
Other data mobility apps and plug-ins already available or near release include Windows7 plug-ins and Android apps designed to interface with AssetWise, for field data collection. "In the app world, things are always changing, and they come quick," Roberts said.
Point Clouds
Another announcement covered Bentley's acquisition of U.K.-based Pointools Ltd., a provider of hardware-neutral point-cloud management technology. Pointools is built around a point-cloud management engine called Vortex that Bentley began incorporating into MicroStation under a license agreement two years ago. Vortex also is a technology that has been licensed for use, via plug-ins, in products of Bentley competitor Autodesk, of AutoCAD, in Google's 3D modeling program SketchUp and in the rendering tools of Rhino, from McNeel North America, Seattle.
Bentley pledges to continue to support existing Pointools products and its POD file format.
Commenting on the acquisition, Tom Greaves—managing director at SPAR Point Group, a Portland, Maine-based consultancy that follows and reports on developments in 3D scanning and image technologies—notes that the point-cloud market is getting very hot and that Bentley's acquisition is part of a larger pattern. "There has been a spate of them in the past 45 days. This is not an isolated event," Greaves says.
Bentley's Cambridge, U.K-based plant-side competitor, AVEVA, purchased Z+F UK Ltd., the software division of the German scanning-device maker Zoller + Fröhlich GmbH, with fanfare on Oct. 3. Bentley's broad-based, multisector competitor, Autodesk very quietly purchased Studio Clouds, a viewing and editing package for dense point-cloud data from Netherlands-based Alice Labs, which has plug-ins for Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max and Maya modelers, on Oct. 16—with no announcement. And now Bentley has purchased Pointools.
Greaves notes that in the case of AVEVA and Bentley, those companies are either purchasing technology or acquiring companies whose technology they already are licensed to use, while Autodesk is acquiring technology from a vendor not already part of its fold.
In each case, Greaves believes the three companies landed technologies that fit their needs well, and he notes that Bentley, with its single platform strategy, is well positioned to leverage its acquisition quickly. "It was a coup for them. It's probably the best thing for Bentley to get Pointools. The match-up and the architecture is pretty good and should let Bentley roll out Pointools in one fell swoop across their product line. Their ability to deploy is a real strength," Greaves says.
Robert Mankowski, a Bentley vice president for software development, says the company licensed Vortex a couple of years ago because it "really liked the performance" and the way it could work with a plethora of proprietary file formats as well as the standard ones generated by a wide array of laser-scan data acquisition devices. He said Bentley decided to acquire the company and its development team because it had plans to integrate Vortex with ProjectWise and found that "we needed to have that expertise in-house."
