To Improve its Highways, Bridges, Railways, and Other Infrastructure and Deploy a More Advanced Geographical Information System
LONDON – BE Conference Europe – Bentley Systems, Incorporated today announced that the city of Overbetuwe, in The Netherlands, has joined Bentley’s Municipal License Subscription (MLS) program. The city will use its new MLS to help improve its highways, bridges, railways, and other infrastructure and deploy a more advanced geographical information system (GIS).
Bentley’s MLS offers municipalities all the software they need to design and manage all their infrastructure for a fixed annual fee based on population. The breakthrough program enables them to improve productivity and reduce administrative costs by outfitting their entire mapping and engineering organizations with fully integrated software for GIS and engineering workflows. This leads to improved services and more efficient government.
Said Gerrit Jakobs, Overbetuwe’s GIS coordinator, “We decided to join Bentley’s MLS program for several reasons. First of all, Bentley’s portfolio provides most of the products and solutions required by our city’s Information and Automation plan. As a result, we will be able to implement our strategy of deploying advanced technology with built-in efficiencies to increase the productivity of our project teams.
“Second, because the program gives us unlimited access to all of the software in the portfolio, it will help us handle new demands being made on Overbetuwe’s service organizations. These demands will only increase as our population grows an anticipated 20 percent in the next three to four years, from 42,500 to somewhere around 51,000.”
Already, expanding residential and industrial centers are creating a need for newly designed highways, bridges, and railways to eliminate periodic congestion. These and other infrastructure projects will be much easier and less expensive to implement now that the city can deploy as many licenses as it needs for whatever applications it requires without incurring additional costs.
Continued Jakobs, “Third, to ensure the quality of our projects and also meet increasingly restrictive statutory obligations, we need a software vendor that not only provides inherently reliable software offering standardized workflows, but also is committed to evolving those products over time. As a global provider of field-proven engineering design and geospatial software for more than 20 years, Bentley meets these requirements and is a partner that we can count on to be around for the long term.”
A number of Overbetuwe’s departments have long used Bentley’s products in the design and management of the city’s infrastructure projects. For example:
- The Public Works Department uses MicroStation extensively for the city’s water and wastewater system, roads and bridges, street lights, and other public lighting systems.
- The Environmental Development Department uses Bentley’s geospatial solutions in developing plans and making proposals for new urban areas, industrial and recreational parks, and other city developments.
- The Department of Public Safety uses MicroStation to develop routing plans for all public and industrial buildings to facilitate the transport of police, fire, and rescue crews to and from public and industrial buildings during natural disasters and other emergencies.
- The Population Affairs Department uses address and building data provided by Bentley’s geospatial solutions to complement its census data.
- The Facility Department supports all of the city’s mapping and GIS functionalities using MicroStation and Bentley’s geospatial solutions.
Bentley’s MLS program provides municipalities with unlimited access to a comprehensive portfolio of integrated GIS and engineering software for all of their infrastructure, including:
- Public works – roads, bridges, potable water, wastewater, and storm water infrastructure
- Land development
- E-government
- Light rail design
- Community broadband
- Electric and gas network design
- Water and wastewater treatment plant design
- Urban planning
- Cadastre management
- Public safety
- Municipal building design
- Mapping and 3D modeling
Because program fees are fixed, Bentley’s MLS guarantees predictable software costs and budgeting. In addition, it removes the administrative burden of complex software licenses, shortens procurement cycles, speeds project starts, and ultimately leads to more efficient government.
Said Jakobs, “Now that we can cost-effectively pilot software solutions in Bentley’s portfolio, we will be deploying a number of new applications in the near future. Our first implementation will be to advance our GIS capabilities so we can open up our back-office geospatial information to our internal project teams as well as to the public. We’ll disseminate this information over intranets and the Internet using Bentley Geo Web Publisher.
“In addition, we plan to deploy a solution specially developed for municipalities in The Netherlands called RoPlan. This software is used for land management and land development projects to ensure conformity to Dutch standards for data sharing and cadastral records.
“And this fall, we will implement Bentley’s ProjectWise collaboration system, initially for geospatial document information. Later on, we want to integrate ProjectWise with our own distributed information system called Corsa. ProjectWise is the ideal solution for this because it readily accommodates all types of file formats, including vector-based files.
“To make all of these new deployments as transparent as possible to our workflows, we also joined Bentley’s Enterprise Training Subscription (ETS) program from Bentley Institute. The ETS offers unlimited training on Bentley software products for a fixed annual fee, so our entire staff will be able to quickly become productive on our new software.”
For more information about Bentley’s MLS program initiative and software or to contact a Bentley representative, visit www.bentley.com/MLS.
About the City of Overbetuwe
Overbetuwe, a city of 42,500 in the province of Gelderland in the eastern Netherlands, was formed on 1 January 2001 as a merger of three municipalities: Elst, Heteren, and Valburg. It lies in the center of an urbanized area and is bordered in the north by the river Rhine and in the south by the Waal.
About BE Conference Europe
BE Conference Europe (www.be.org) is taking place this week at the Hilton London Metropole in the United Kingdom. This once-a-year learning opportunity is modeled after the highly successful BE Conference held in the United States.
The BE Conference is an annual gathering of Bentley user organizations who want to sharpen their skills and expand their knowledge. Attendees better themselves, better their organizations, and better the ways they can improve the world’s infrastructure. Year after year, the BE Conference scores a 99 percent satisfaction rating among attendees.
For more information on the BE Conference, go to www.be.org.
About Bentley
Bentley Systems, Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure. The company’s comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2400 colleagues globally, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top Design Firms and major owner-operators, and was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.
To receive Bentley press releases as they are issued, visit www.bentley.com/bentleywire. For more information, visit www.bentley.com. To view a copy of Bentley’s April 2007 Annual Report online, go to www.bentley.com/April2007annualreport.
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Bentley, the “B” logo, BE, Municipal License Subscription, MLS, Bentley Geo Web Publisher, MicroStation, ProjectWise, Enterprise Training Subscription, ETS, and RoPlan 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 trademarks are the property of their respective owners.