CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This report includes forward‑looking statements. All statements contained in this report other than statements of historical facts, including statements regarding our future results of operations and financial position, our business strategy and plans and our objectives for future operations, are forward‑looking statements. The words “believe,” “may,” “will,” “estimate,” “continue,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “expect,” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward‑looking statements. We have based these forward‑looking statements largely on our current expectations, projections, and assumptions about future events and financial trends that we believe may affect our financial condition, results of operations, business strategy, short‑term and long‑term business operations and objectives, and financial needs. These forward‑looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those described in the section titled “Risk Factors.” Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks emerge from time to time. It is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward‑looking statements we may make. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, the future events and trends discussed in this report may not occur and actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward‑looking statements. The forward‑looking statements, as well as our report as a whole, are subject to risks and uncertainties.
These statements are only current predictions and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our or our industry’s actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those anticipated by the forward‑looking statements. We discuss many of these risks in this report in greater detail in the section titled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this report. You should not rely upon forward‑looking statements as predictions of future events.
Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward‑looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, achievements, events, or circumstances reflected in the forward‑looking statements will occur. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any of these forward‑looking statements after the date of this report to conform these statements to actual results or revised expectations.
Market and Industry Data
The market and industry data used in this report are based on independent industry publications, customers, trade or business organizations, reports by market research firms and other published statistical information from third parties (collectively, the “Third Party Information”), as well as information based on management’s good faith estimates, which we derive from our review of internal information and independent sources. Such Third Party Information generally states that the information contained therein or provided by such sources has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable.
Item 1. Business
Bentley Systems: The Infrastructure Engineering Software Company
We are a leading global provider of software for infrastructure engineering, enabling the work of civil, structural, geotechnical, and plant engineering practitioners, their project delivery enterprises, and owner‑operators of infrastructure assets. We were founded in 1984 by the Bentley brothers. Our enduring commitment is to develop and support the most comprehensive portfolio of integrated software offerings across professional disciplines, project and asset lifecycles, infrastructure sectors, and geographies. Our software enables digital workflows across engineering disciplines, distributed project teams, from offices to the field, and across computing form factors, including desktops, on-premises servers, cloud-native services, mobile devices, and web browsers. We deliver our solutions via on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. Our users engineer, construct, and operate projects and assets across the following infrastructure sectors:
•public works (including roads, rail, airports, ports, and water and wastewater networks)/utilities (including electric, gas, water, and communications). We estimate that this sector represents 51% of the net infrastructure asset value of the global top 500 infrastructure owners (the “global top 500 infrastructure owners”) based on the 2020 edition of the Bentley Infrastructure 500 Top Owners, our annual compilation of the world’s largest infrastructure owners ranked by net depreciated value of their tangible fixed assets;
•industrial (including discrete and process manufacturing, power generation, and water treatment plants)/resources (including oil and gas, mining, and offshore). We estimate that this sector represents 37% of the global top 500 infrastructure owners’ net infrastructure asset value; and
•commercial/facilities (including office buildings, hospitals, and campuses). We estimate that this sector represents 12% of the global top 500 infrastructure owners’ net infrastructure asset value.
We address both the project and asset lifecycle phases of infrastructure, each with applications and enterprise information systems. Our Project Lifecycle solutions encompass conception, planning, surveying, design, engineering, simulation, and construction, as well as the collaboration offerings required to coordinate and share the work of interdisciplinary and/or distributed project teams. Our Asset Lifecycle solutions span the operating life of commissioned infrastructure assets, allowing our accounts to manage engineering changes for safety and compliance and to model performance and reliability to support operating and maintenance decisions.
Our Solutions
We offer solutions for enterprises and professionals across the infrastructure lifecycle. Our Project Delivery and Asset and Network Performance solutions are systems provided via cloud and hybrid environments, developed respectively to extend enterprise collaboration during project delivery, and to manage and leverage engineering information during operations and maintenance. Our Design Integration and Digital Cities solutions are primarily desktop applications and cloud-provisioned solutions for professional practitioners and workgroups. Our cloud-native Digital Twins solutions introduce digital workflows, which can span our Project Lifecycle and Asset Lifecycle solutions.
Project Lifecycle Solutions. Our Project Lifecycle solutions span conception, planning, surveying, design, simulation, and construction, as well as the collaboration software services required to coordinate and share the work of interdisciplinary and/or distributed project teams.
Design Integration. Our Design Integration solutions consist of modeling and simulation applications. Our modeling applications are domain-specific authoring tools used by professionals for the 3D design and documentation of infrastructure assets. Our simulation applications enable engineers to analyze the functional performance of the designs created with our modeling applications (or those of competitive vendors), preferably in iterative digital workflows, to improve engineering outcomes and to ensure compliance with design codes.
Benefits of our Design Integration applications to infrastructure engineers include:
•Better designs. Our modeling and simulation applications work together to improve infrastructure engineering quality, for instance to eliminate “clashes” across respective disciplines’ work. Each application is for a specific purpose (asset-type or discipline; for example, OpenRoads for roadway design), and supports corresponding asset-specific engineering workflows (for example, the workflow a civil engineer would use in designing a road) by virtue of:
•Better engineering productivity. We endeavor to provide in our applications the most advanced and automated intelligence for transforming engineers’ conceptual decisions into complete, detailed, and editable deliverables; and
•Better configurability and continuity. We take care to enable users to continuously refine their modeling preferences and standards across successive generations of our applications. This capability enables engineers, throughout their careers, to maintain continuity and compatibility with their preferred interfaces, formats, and methodologies, while advancing their work at the leading edge of innovation;
•Better deliverables. Our applications share a common modeling environment to enable streamlined coordination and production of multi-discipline documentation; and
•Better handoff. Our comprehensive modeling environment and our supplemental cloud services enable projects to enrich information sharing (and to minimize problematic translations) across project delivery processes. For instance:
•by starting with reality modeling of existing conditions (often from drone surveying);
•by sharing engineering component definitions across disciplines and projects; and
•through “constructioneering” digital workflows, which automate the exchange of 3D design models to control GPS-enabled construction equipment (for earthmoving and paving), and to validate and preserve the resulting 3D as‑built models for maintenance.
Project Delivery. Our Project Delivery solutions support information and document management, engineering‑specific collaboration and work‑sharing for distributed project teams and enterprises, and construction planning, modeling and execution. The scope of these solutions is not limited to users of only our own design applications.
Often during the project delivery lifecycle, key data are constantly changing, with inputs received from multiple sources, resulting in the need for a single source of information that is used to collect, manage, and disseminate information for the whole project team. Our software assures that the rapidly-changing data are managed in a common data environment (“CDE”) such that only the correct milestone versions can be shared and referenced across the project. This functionality enables infrastructure project organizations to “virtualize” their talent so that the required work can be shared by all participants everywhere through our software, reducing the need for physical co-location of the project resources.
Our 4D construction modeling software spatially and temporally integrates a project’s 3D engineering models into its construction schedules to assess sequencing strategies and to visualize and understand planned and actual progress over the project timeline. Our solutions also enable project delivery teams to optimally define and manage discrete engineering, construction, and installation work packages, including the construction trades’ “workface planning,” which considers crafts and materials by day and zone. For work packages which increasingly take advantage of modular offsite fabrication and manufacturing, our software manages and enables 4D visualization of the necessary spatial and logistical interfaces.
Benefits of our Project Delivery solutions to project delivery enterprises include:
•Distributed work-sharing. Our solutions incorporate the rigorous workflow protocols required for structured coordination across engineering and construction supply chains, enabling global sourcing for integrated project delivery, while maximizing economics, quality, and safety;
•Comprehensive collaboration. Our software leverages cloud and hybrid environments to streamline the aggregation, distribution, and interaction for project deliverables, ensuring that the right project participants have the right information in the right format at the right time, including at the project site and on every device; and