Bentley Systems develops, sells, and supports software for the design, construction, and operation of infrastructure. Their software is used in the building, plant, civil, and geospatial markets.
“Even though a lot of infrastructure work is done by engineering firms and private companies, it is tied to public funding, and there’s no slowdown in public funding for infrastructure. Infrastructure investments are going to be needed, to stimulate the economy,” Nicholas Cumins, CEO, of Bentley Systems, told ET.
Maintaining strong fiscal support for infrastructure over the next five years, the Indian government in the budget allocated a spend of Rs 11.11 lakh crore for capital expenditure for FY2024-25, which is 3.4% of GDP.
Bentley Systems has been in operation in India for over 24 years. Its user base includes firms across engineering and construction companies and several public sector agencies involved in the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure.
Approximately 70% of the software work being done by the company in India is engineering resources supporting projects outside of India, with the remaining 30% supporting local Indian projects.”The next five years we see a lot of growth continuing in water; the water infrastructure and energy, which is especially around the transmission distribution as that network and the grid is modernised, we see a lot of growth potential there. And of course, renewables is a strong potential driver,” said Cumins, adding that it sees its Indian user base expanding.Bentley Systems India has a workforce of over 800 engineers, which represents more than 15% of its global workforce. But there is a shortage of engineers and the industry demand is far outpacing what the company is able to deliver. “In some countries, you will see backlogs that got least one year out and you will see engineering firms who refuse work,” said Cumins.
This October, Bentley Systems, tied up with Google to integrate Google’s high-quality geospatial content with Bentley’s infrastructure engineering software and digital twin platform to improve the way infrastructure is designed, built, and operated.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a big role to play when it comes to an existing infrastructure asset and we need to understand the operating foundations of that asset,” said Cumins adding that there are two ways of doing it-sending people to inspect the facility or use digital means by flying a drone that captures pictures and videos of infrastructure asset.
“And then we use AI to process all of that data and understand, “Ah! This is vegetation or this is a potential crack or spalling on a bridge, and then we can trigger remediation work. We see governments as becoming more aware of this,” added Cumins.