Bentley’s Acquisition of SpecWave Brings Enterprise-level Information Management for Specifications, Projects and Assets

 

Through SpecWave, eB Insight, and the forthcoming Bentley CONNECT SaaS environment that enables infrastructure practitioners to connect enterprises, projects, content, and individuals with each other, Bentley Specification Services will enable specifications to be purposefully shared across distributed, multidisciplinary project, operations, and inspection teams. Other inaugural Bentley CONNECT capabilities will include Bentley Connection Space, Bentley Simulation Services, and extensions to ProjectWise collaboration services and AssetWise asset lifecycle information management services. Additionally, Bentley CONNECT will provide subscribers with software update services, Bentley Institute learning services, and more.

Bhupinder Singh, senior vice president, Bentley Software, said, “We are pleased to welcome back to Bentley Leon Gorbaty and Adam Klatzkin, principals of The Engineering Essentials Company (TEEC) and the inventors of SpecWave. Together, we will finally enable information management to comprehend the mission-critical AECO content within documents – transparent to human readers but hitherto inscrutable to software. Specs and other structured documents are crucially important across projects, engineering disciplines, and the lifecycle of assets – from design throughout bidding and contractual processes, construction work packaging, and inspections, and ultimately for operational reliability and safety. But up to now, no one has accomplished the breakthroughs in rigor necessary for securing information mobility, with integrity, for text objects.”

 

He continued, “Leon and Adam changed all of this by making it possible to reach inside structured documents to parse and organize the content at the semantic level of individual and unique text objects. As a result, integral constituent parts of documents can now be harvested, persisted, accessed, repurposed, change-managed, and controlled, with text objects becoming a new fundamental data type for Bentley. Accordingly, we can next leverage the full enterprise-level information management capabilities of our eB Insight services for essential document contents starting with specifications, but also including, for example, compliance and safety documents. Finally, through Bentley CONNECT, Bentley Specification Services will enable corporate, project, and owner spec standards to be maintained, shared, tracked, and enforced across teams, projects, and enterprises.”

 

Early on, the Construction Sciences Research Foundation (CSRF) saw the potential for SpecWave to provide significant benefit to industry and last year joined Bentley as an investor in TEEC. According to Raymond Best, the president of CSRF’s Board of Directors, “We’re confident that our early investment in TEEC has already yielded returns for the industry through the breakthroughs provided by SpecWave. We’re equally confident that Bentley’s acquisition of SpecWave will provide the commitment and resources to ultimately deliver on our vision for the potential offered by SpecWave.”

 

SpecWave provides optimized editing for specification writers, with advanced attributes and tagging of content enforced by templates, and specification-driven process support for submittals, quality assurance, and other business workflows. SpecWave enables users to create, administer, and automate complex specifications and other content as highly portable SPECX files that can be leveraged in familiar workflows, exchanged as i-models, and now managed within ProjectWise and AssetWise.

 

SpecWave’s SPECX format has emerged as an endorsed standard for structured engineering content within Fiatech, an international community working together to lead global development and adoption of innovative practices and technologies to realize the highest business value throughout the lifecycle of capital assets. The Open Packing Conventions SPECX format was further developed, prototyped, and put into production as a result of collaboration through the Fiatech Specification Automation project. Per the Fiatech website, “By combining good fit for the subject-matter domain with a good fit for tools and application development, the SPECX file format and associated schemas deliver a solid foundation for the interoperability of the most important documents in the capital facilities industry.”

Commenting on his company’s use of the SPECX-based SpecWave program to improve its specification program, Eric Michnovez, manager of the Master Specs Program for ENR Top Design Firm #22 CDM Smith, said, “My users love the results, saying things like, ‘I love the new specs facilitated by SpecWave. I just did a specification, and it was awesome how it formatted. I finished editing it, and I was done! Where were these tools before?’ and ‘How wonderful that CDM Smith has created Master Specs with a refined look and feel. What a pleasure to finally use styles and other ease-of-use features. It’s clever that we can ‘keep’ all comments and always retrieve them.’”

 

Leon Gorbaty, formerly CEO of TEEC and now director of product management at Bentley, said, “We have been continually surprised and gratified at the interest at executive levels in adopting SpecWave to capture and to begin to advance the quality of project and enterprise specification standards for architecture, engineering, and owner organizations. Its combination with Bentley’s eB Insight for industrial-strength information management is an exciting development that rapidly accelerates our progress to fulfill these unmet needs of our many SpecWave enterprise prospects. And the Bentley CONNECT SaaS environment will enable Bentley Specification Services to reach and benefit every specs constituent. I’m glad to be engaged in this important work within the Bentley team.”

 

Additional information about SpecWave is available at www.bentley.com/SpecWave.

 

eB Insight, the foundation of Bentley’s AssetWise system of servers and services, controls information throughout the lifecycle of change, ensuring the delivery of relevant, trusted information to infrastructure operations, where and when it is needed. eB Insight
uniquely integrates configuration and change management best practices to deliver powerful asset lifecycle information management capabilities.

 

eB Insight links interrelated information, no matter what discrete information system it resides in, no matter what the format – structured or unstructured, paper or electronic, documents or physical objects, business processes or people. Information is exposed, along with its status and relationships, to other relevant information assets, ensuring that workers have access to accurate information, in context. Visibility to related information enables better decision making, as well as thorough change impact analysis through eB Insight’s standardized reporting. For additional information about eB Insight, visit www.bentley.com/eb.

Be Inspired: Innovations in Infrastructure is an invitation-only conference that provides a unique forum for senior-level executives to learn about the innovations driving the development and operations of the world’s top infrastructure projects. At the 2012 conference, taking place this week in Amsterdam, Netherlands, industry thought leaders will engage in interactive discussions on topics of utmost importance to the business of sustaining infrastructure. Also in attendance are more than 80 members of the global media, who additionally participated in a special media day briefing on November 12.

 

The conference features presentations by the Be Inspired Awards finalists and Be Inspired Special Recognition Awards winners, as well as executive roundtables focusing on business, technology, and practice issues crucial to infrastructure professionals around the world. It will culminate in the Be Inspired Awards ceremony recognizing outstanding achievement and innovation in infrastructure design, construction, and operations by winners selected from 58 project finalists by five independent panels of jurors. In total, nominations from more than 250 organizations in 39 countries were submitted in this year’s awards program. For additional information about the Be Inspired: Innovations in Infrastructure event, visit www.bentley.com/BeInspired.

Bentley is the global leader dedicated to providing architects, engineers, geospatial professionals, constructors, and owner-operators with comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure. Bentley Systems applies information mobility to improve asset performance by leveraging information modeling through integrated projects for intelligent infrastructure. Its solutions encompass the MicroStation platform for infrastructure design and modeling, the ProjectWise platform for infrastructure project team collaboration and work sharing, and the AssetWise platform for infrastructure asset operations – all supporting a broad portfolio of interoperable applications and complemented by worldwide professional services. Founded in 1984, Bentley has more than 3,000 colleagues in 50 countries, more than $500 million in annual revenues, and since 2003 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. To view a searchable collection of innovative infrastructure projects from the annual Be Inspired Awards, access Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure publications. 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.