The CAD Insider

Bentley SELECT and the New Exchange Option

Bentley's announcement of raising prices (see CAD Insider post) for MicroStation subscription and adding the new Software Exchange option raised a few questions and made me want to take a closer look at the whole SELECT program. I sought out Joe Croser, Bentley's Gloabal Marketing Director for Platform products (MicroStation, ProjectWise and SELECT) for answers.

Croser confirmed that even if you had bought MicroStation years ago for only $2,500, as long as you are on subscription, you can get it's current value applied to any Bentley product with the new Annual Exchange program. You can do this only once a year and only when it comes time to renew.

Note that even with the old SELECT program, you could always update your software, but the new Annual Exchange program allows you to trade in one software program for another.

The key is that users must stay on the subscription plan to ensure that their software will keep its current value. What if you had let your subscription lapse? You will have to catch up with your payments, says Croser, before you can take advantage of this program. But what if you have let your subscription lapse so long ago that the cost to catch up would be prohibitive? Croser would not say, but CAD Insider suspects Bentley may be lend a sympathetic ear and negotiate.

What is the cost of the SELECT program? It was $625 an year (or 13% of the list price) for MicroStation and it is being raised to $725 (15% of the list price). Volume discounts are available. For other Bentley products, SELECT cost 15-20% of the list price per year. "So you see, we are just bringing up the cost of MicroStation subscription so it is in line with our other products."

"Suppose you have a 10 seat license of MicroStation, but you think you can make do with less, and you want to get into BIM," says Croser. "You can trade in one of those licenses for Bentley Architecture." Or STAAD. Or RAM.

One caveat: stopping the subsription program after taking advantage of the exchange option will cause you to revert back to the original program. Suppose you traded in MicroStation licenses for STAAD licenses. If you leave the subscription program, Bentley would have you stop using STAAD and go back to MicroStation (although it would the latest version of MicroStation). "You would revert to the program you had a perpetual license for," says Croser.

Croser estimates approximately 2/3 of Bentley revenue now comes from subscriptions. "We're a subscription company. The majority of our customers are in the SELECT program."

What accounts for the success of the SELECT program? Look what they get for subscribing, says Croser.

• Upgrades ("we like to call them 'updates' ")
• Telephone support ("not just email support,  like Autodesk gives their subscribers")
• License pooling ("Autodesk charges 15% additional to pool licenses)
• Free conferences registration ("they do have to pay for classes but general sessions, exhibits are free, that's a $600 value")
• membership in the developer network
• 2 free eLearning courses (for MicroStation)

The price for MicroStation subscription increase is in effect after 1st renewal date after September 1, 2006. Other Bentley products do not have a subscription increase.

How does Bentley's subscription plan compare with Autodesk's. Autodesk has been trying to shift users to a subscription plan for years. Although the AutoCAD annual subscription rate is a few hundred dollars less, he estimates SELECT's value -- with phone support, free license pooling, e-courses, conference fee, redlining and membership in the developer network -- to add up to a lot more than the difference in cost.

"They're just not getting any traction," says Croser

Flash: Bentley Raises MicroStation Subscription, Adds Exchange Option

Bentley is hiking the price of its MicroStation subscription service, SELECT, by $100 a year to $725 a year. According to Bentley, this increases the cost of the subscription program from 13% to 15% of the software.

To justify the cost, Bentley is pumping up the SELECT program with the "Annual License Exchange," just announced at the BE2006, which allows users to trade in their existing BENTLEY software towards any current software the company offers. Bentley promises to give current price of the software as a trade in value, not what the user may originally have paid for it.

"There's nothing like it in the industry, says Malcolm Walter, Bentley's COO. To help us understand, he uses an example from another industry. Walter has us imagine Porsche allowing an owner who bought a 911 Carerra in 1996 for $63,000 to walk out of a dealer's showroom with a brand new Cayenne, Porsche's hot SUV -- for no additional cost --  instead of allowing the more measly but real world trade in value of $23,000. "Bentley gives you your money back to reinvest in the latest software," he says.

More details in CADinsider follow up.

Cool Tech - Bentley Distance Learning

Want to make MicroStation sing and dance but your scrooge of a boss won't ante up the cost of airfare and hotel for a class at Bentley headquarters? Pout no more. Bentley offers instructor-led, live classes through the Internet that will stream onto your desktop. Through a microphone/headset and VoIP hook up (your IT staffer can set that up for you), you can ask questions (even dumb ones, your online so no one knows who you are) and even raise your hand (with a icon).

Shown above, two students (with backs to us) get instruction from teacher (facing them) in a simulation of Bentley's distance learning at BE 2006

Tuition cost for course is the same as if you were to physically attend, but of course, money for air fare, hotels and margaritas will stay right in your company's coffers. Also, you won't lose any time from your projects getting back and forth, and you will work smarter and faster, making this a very easy sell to even the tightest company management.

Bentley points out that it does one better than the traditional classroom which can be dominated by a few vocal students by letting all students have equal "voice" since all have equal access to talk or typing through a chat interface.

The interface seems easy to use. You can see MicroStation in a large window, while the attendees and chat areas appear in smaller windows.

You will have to buy your own microphone/headset. Not all courses are offered via this method--28 were listed on the printed schedule I picked up at BE2006. For the latest information, go to www.bentley.com/training.

Bentley Conference: Best of Show

ParkCAD is one of those products that will make you wonder how you ever got along without it. Even if you'll only create one parking lot, this add-on for AutoCAD and MicroStation will be worth it.

ParkCAD automates the design of parking lots. Installing it is like having a magic button on your keyboard that will fill an area with neatly lined parking stall, complete with curbstones, islands and stall number, should you want them. OK, so maybe it's not quite that easy--you do have to enter some parameters for stall length, width, isle width, etc., but it sure beats the heck out of manually drawing and copying lines to create arrays of stalls and then having to count them, then repeat the whole process not once but several times until the space is optimally utilized. ParkCAD takes just about all the drudgery out of the task with its optimization techniques and auto-numbering.

ParkCAD 2.1 has not officially been announced but was on display at the Bentley 2006 user meeting. It sells for approximately $1300. An AutoCAD 2007 version is due out soon.

ParkCAD is created by Transoft, which makes other equally specialized products for airport design ( AeroTURN) and highway design (AutoTURN).

Bentley Conference: Pentagon Design Build

Walker Lee Evey, president of Design Build Institute of America, worked on the rebuilding of the Pentagon after 9/11, called in on the biggest design-build project ever. The 3500 specification documents stacked to a height of 6 and a half feet. Highlight of his talk:

• Evey has been educated in psyhology and special education, perfect for addressing engineers and architects.
• Forces working on your project are a PEST: political, economic, social, political
• A meeting at his firm resulted in a fracas. "I can't believe this is the way you guys to business. This is the most dysfunctional group of people I have ever seen," says Evy. Someone explained, "A lot of these people like to fight and and are now enjoying being in jobs that pay them to do it."
• Any organization with over 25 people has an collective average IQ. (The average IQ in America in about 110)
• How many have flown in airplane designed by Lockheed Martin but built by Boeing? Trick question, such a plane does not exist. AEC is the only business where things are designed by one set of people and built by another.

AEC MCAD -- Worlds That Don't Collide

Some of the capabilities MCAD users now take for granted, such as interference checking, CAM and parametrics seem to be cutting edge in AEC. Here are examples from the Bentley user conference:

• A sheet metal flat pattern of ductwork was created on CAD and sent to to a NC machine. "No paper." The audience applauded. This is the CAM 101 exercise given to MCAD users.
• An electrical raceway through a industrial building showed a "soft" interference. Most MCAD programs have automatic interference detection.
• Bentley Generative Components, due September, will allow parametric 3D design. The audience oohed and ahhed when they saw a building change shape as a few parameters were adjusted. Haven't these people seen Pro/E? SolidWorks? Bentley is so protective of this "new" technology, it won't even let you have it unless you have taken a 2 day course.

Bentley Conference: Analysis

Bentley is pushing its recently acquired analysis tools, STAAD and RAM and now bills itself as the "largest and most comprehensive portfolio of structural analysis and design applications in the world." The acquisitions have led to product overlap with each other as well as with Bentley existing structural tools but this is how Bentley now chooses to differentiate them:

• STAAD: general purpose analysis, bridges, piping
• RAM: building, concrete structures

STAAD has over 60 global building and design codes (over 60) including the most largest and most lucrative growth market, China.

With the acquisitions, there are now more civil engineers at Bentley than there are architects.

Bentley Structural will read a RAM model and create a DGN file from it.

Bentley will offer a flexible licensing program that will allow a user to use any of Bentley's analysis tools, one at a time, with a single license.

Bentley Conference: BIM, BIM and more BIM

The BE 2006, like all user conferences, cannot help but make its attendees feel inadequate. A user may enter patting themselves on the back about being up on the software and technology, even using BIM in one form or another, feeling superior to all the poor bums just doing 2D CAD work. However, after a week of getting pounded with a seemingly endless BIM this and BIM that, coupled with green design, collaboration, analysis, printing 3D and so on, even a power MicroStation user is bound to be humbled.

If you have been orbiting Pluto for the last 5 years and are wondering what BIM, here is one definition offered by Jennifer Groupil, editor of Structural Engineering magazine:

BIM: The combination of creating an intelligent and computable 3D data set and sharing the data among multiple disciplines with the purpose of sharing of the data.

And you thought it was just about making 3D models of buildings.

So if are feeling behind everybody on BIM understanding and implementation, don't feel bad. A recent urvey done by Structural Engineering revealed the following,:

• 64% of responders were not familiar with BIM, virtual building or e-building. Even those who said they knew what BIM was, varied greatly in their definition of it
• 70% have not used BIM on projects.
• For the ones who had specific reasons not to use BIM, no one stated that it was because they thought BIM was a passing trend. In other words, all seemed to realize that BIM was here to stay.
• The biggest group (43%) expect BIM to be in widespread use in 5-10 years
• BIM used mostly in big, expensive projects like museums, high rises, performing arts centers, etc.

Other highlights from Day 2 include:

• Bentley has swung itself around to align with SketchUp, the 3D architectural program. Bentley can converts SketchUp files (SKP) to MicroStation (DGN), use SketchUp reference files and place SketchUp files as cells.
• Term bound to catch on: "petting zoo" - area where product are demonstrated, as in "See you all later at the civil engineering petting zoo.

Bentley User Conference: Q&A

The following is paraphrased from a Q&A session with Bentley representative, including Keith Bentley.

What does XM short for?
Nothing, it's just a name.

Will Bentley use the XML format for MicroStation?
There are a lot of advantages to using XML instead of DGN but we have not decided when or if we are going to do that.

Does Bentley have a hard time finding employees?
Yes.

Does Bentley maintain development centers abroad?
Yes. There are development centers in in Finland, China and India. The China and India development centers will be the ones growing the fastest.

Why did Bentley choose Google Earth to work with? There are other (better) technologies.
Google is ubiquitious. We are amazed by the pickup of Google Earth.

Isn't Google Earth just a visualization tool?
It is a visualization tool but we feel it can be used for business decisions.

How much development is user driven? How much is determined by Bentley?
Like other software companies, it is a combination of the two.

Bentley User Conference: MicroStation V8 XM Edition

These were the most popular enhancements in MicroStation V8 XM Edition, judging from crowd response.

• Reference a PDF within the model. The 2D PDF document shows up like a flat sheet, complete with markups, in the MicroStation 3D model. The PDF file is dynamically linked to the model. (see picture)
• The DGN file format does not change ("transition to V8 XM should be painless")
• Define a animation path for use in Google Earth. After a MicroStation model has been placed in Google Earth, a curve drawn is used by Google Earth to pan around the project

A full discussion of MicroStation V8 XM edition is available at Bentley's website here, and of ProjectWise V8 XM here.

SELECT subscribers can download and an early version of V8 XM at www.be.org/getv8xmnow. The official release is expected tomorrow.

Kieth Bentley, CTO, holds Microsoft as an example of a file format standard, as Microsoft is opening up the specification for XML.  Further evidence of "openness" was that although the next version of Office will introduce a new file format, Microsoft will make it it "retroactively upgradeable." This will be done with a freely available utility that will allow Office 2003 users to read the new file format. This is quite unlike Autodesk, says Keith, which capitalizes in DWG incompatibility between versions, forcing users to upgrade. "That is some companies business model," he says disdainfully.

Keith's favorite improvement for XM is the Distributed DGN technology that occurs in ProjectWise V8 XM Edition. This allows many users to work and change the same DGN file -- each doing so independently of the others -- and then ProjectWise sorts all changes out and merges them into one updated DGN file.

The next edition of MicroStation code is code named Monet and is already in development. Bentley is on a 2 year release cycle.