Provides Improved Project Performance via Instant-on Environment With
Pre-configured Best Practices to Serve All Design and Engineering Firms

LOS ANGELES, Calif., U.S.A. – 2014 ZweigWhite Hot Firm and A/E Industry Awards Conference – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced the availability of ProjectWise Essentials, a cloud-based, instant-on design integration environment for all projects. This “software at your service” provides immediate access to key advantages of ProjectWise, the world’s leading design collaboration and work sharing solution, while enabling user organizations to further benefit from a budget-friendly, predictable cost model.

ProjectWise helps AEC project organizations avoid risk and stay competitive by enabling high performance project delivery. It provides information mobility with integrity, cross-functional work process management, and change management to increase information quality and visibility throughout the project lifecycle.

Deployed in 101 countries, ProjectWise is the design integration and collaboration system of choice for all of the ENR Top 25 Design Firms, the majority of U.S. state departments of transportation, and 81 of the ENR Top 100 Design Firms, with over $120 billion in annual design billings. With ProjectWise, these firms report 14 percent higher professional utilization (than comparable firms without ProjectWise) and are assured that every hour of professional work is fully leveraged for project advantage, without waste or risk.

Susan Brandt, Bentley vice president, ProjectWise collaboration products, said, “While projects may vary in size and complexity, all projects benefit from a robust collaboration platform, and all firms and all engineers benefit from work sharing. That’s why I’m excited that we’ve extended the ‘industrial-strength’ ProjectWise to all design and engineering firms, enabling each to realize the benefits being achieved by the top AEC organizations around the world. Our cloud-based ProjectWise Essentials ‘software at your service’ eliminates the necessity of system or server administration – which might have posed particular challenges for smaller firms and projects – and gains are immediate. For example, ProjectWise Essentials is engineered to painlessly overcome the ‘big file problem’ when work sharing across offices in different locations.”

Within the ProjectWise Essentials environment, geographically dispersed teams managing projects small to “mega” in size and scope can leverage industry standards and best practices required to speed secure information sharing and the exchange and delivery of project drawings, models, documentation, and complex reference files – in support of applications commonly used in AEC projects, including Revit and AutoCAD Civil 3D. This increases team productivity, mitigates project risk, lowers costs, and improves project performance. ProjectWise Essentials also improves the fidelity and reliability of this information – through, for example, the provisioning of provenance and audit trails – reducing redesigns and the risk of errors.

In addition, ProjectWise Essentials enhances the agility that design and engineering firms need to quickly respond to varying project requirements, improving operational readiness as well as return on investment. In this instant-on collaboration environment, project teams, including site personnel, are connected virtually. To achieve information mobility with integrity, they are granted immediate and secure online, offline, and web access to design and construction information. The included Bentley CONNECTIONS Passports entitle ProjectWise Essentials participants to use all of Bentley’s mobile apps, including Bentley Map Mobile, Field Supervisor, InspectTech Collector Mobile, Navigator Mobile, ProjectWise Explorer Mobile, and the Bentley LEARN App.

User organizations further benefit from the ability to:

• take advantage of the industry standards and best practices required to support today’s BIM workflows across distributed teams;
• control access to BIM models, support version control, and manage change in associated models – contributing to better cost control and construction quality;
• automate the management of complex relationships among documents and components;
• share large work-in-progress datasets across offices in real time and instantly communicate design changes made by others without the need to resend large files;
• control access to documents; and
• search easily at both the file and component levels.

Moreover, ProjectWise Essentials lets project teams interact with project information in views that directly relate to their specific task requirements – without needing the authoring applications. These views include a spatial view for map-based navigation, a web view for online browser access, a permissions view for access control management, a dependency view for understanding and managing complex file relationships, and a component view to search across 2D and 3D content.

Commenting on his organization’s experiences with ProjectWise Essentials as an early access subscriber, James Downing, operations manager, Territory & Municipal Services, Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government, said, “Territory and Municipal Services (TAMS) set out to transform the flow of information in infrastructure project delivery both internally as well as between local industry and government. With ProjectWise Essentials,our hosted cloud solution was an absolute game changer. TAMS relied heavily on Bentley’s track record in facilitating the establishment of a highly secure environment.”

For additional information

• To learn more about ProjectWise Essentials and/or to watch for upcoming ProjectWise Essentials webinars, click here.
• To learn more about ProjectWise, click here.
• To learn more about Bentley Apps, click here.

About Bentley Systems

Bentley Systems is the global leader dedicated to providing architects, engineers, geospatial professionals, constructors, and owner-operators with comprehensive software solutions for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure. Bentley users leverage information mobility across disciplines and throughout the infrastructure lifecycle to deliver better-performing projects and assets. Bentley solutions encompass MicroStation applications for information modeling, ProjectWise collaboration services to deliver integrated projects, and AssetWise operations services to achieve intelligent infrastructure – complemented by worldwide professional services and comprehensive managed services.

Founded in 1984, Bentley has more than 3,000 colleagues in over 50 countries, more than $600 million in annual revenues, and since 2006 has invested more than $1 billion in research, development, and acquisitions.

Additional information about Bentley is available at www.bentley.com and in Bentley’s annual report. For Bentley news as it happens, subscribe to an RSS feed of Bentley press releases and news alerts. Visit The Year in Infrastructure 2014 Conference for highlights of Bentley’s premier thought-leadership event. To view a searchable collection of innovative infrastructure projects from the annual Be Inspired Awards, access Bentley’s Infrastructure Yearbooks. To access a professional networking site that enables members of the infrastructure community to connect, communicate, and learn from each other, visit Be Communities.

To download the Bentley Infrastructure 500 Top Owners ranking, a unique global compendium of the top public- and private-sector owners of infrastructure based on the value of their cumulative infrastructure investments, visit www.bentley.com/500.

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Bentley, the “B” Bentley logo, Be, Bentley Map Mobile, Bentley Field Supervisor, InspectTech Collector Mobile, Bentley Navigator Mobile, ProjectWise Explorer Mobile, Bentley LEARN App, MicroStation, and ProjectWise are either registered or unregistered trademarks or service marks of Bentley Systems, Incorporated or one of its direct or indirect wholly owned subsidiaries. All other brands and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.