Bentley User Conference: Sold Out!

I've never heard about a user conference selling out. BE 2006 declared itself sold out with 2,000 attendees. However, this seems to be a self imposed limit. There were many empty seats at the keynote speech. Both Autodesk's and SolidWorks user conferences have more attendees.

Of the Bentley attendees, 31% are civil users, 22% are in building.

Keynote Highlights

Tony Flynn's (Bentley's chief marketing officer) version of heaven is a bottomless cup of latte and an endless sea of muffins, but he introduced what he says is the next best thing, Bentley LEARN

• subscription based training on users computers.
• instructor led classroom-type courses as well as on-demand training
• optional server-based application for customer-created courses
• previews at conference but won't be released in June

Greg Bentley, Bentley CEO

Among Bentley employees, many hold professional degrees, including:

• 245 civil engineers
• 191 mechanical engineers

You'd expect IT degrees, and of course, Bentley does have those, too, but having so many on board with training similar to its user base is bound to be an advantage for Bentley. I wonder how this compares to Autodesk.

Bentley is the "biggest Autodesk developer, by far." However, Greg Bentley could not resist several digs against Autodesk, their biggest competitor, for

• pushing its own DWF format in opposition to Adobe
• "Autodesk's characteristic disregard for interoperability," a reference to Autodesk's proprietary DWG format

MicroStation V8 XM

MicroStation V8 XM will be released tomorrow (May 23). It will include:

• ProjectWise Startpoint, an introductory version of ProjectWise which can be used without a server and is claimed to be easier to set up.
• Advanced 3D Adobe functionality

Acquisition is ramping up. Bentley went from acquiring one company a year to 4 or more for the last 2 years. Most significant recent acquisition has been STAAD and RAM for structural analysis. Bentley hopes to integrate analysis tools into its BIM solutions.

Highlights from annual report*.

• ENR says 90% of Fortune 500 companies using Bentley software
• earnings, profit at record levels
• over half of revenue are from outside US

*Although Bentley is a private company, it has published an annual report in the style of publicly traded companies since it considered but did no not consummate an IPO a few years ago.

Comments

[Chuck]

The classrooms at BE were all full and overflowing. I think the classroom sizes dictated the "sell out" of the conference

[Roopinder Tara]

Although Bentley is enjoying saying they are "sold out," fellow editor Martyn Day did a little digging to find out that points out that previous Bentley user conferences actually had more attendees. The 2002 conference in Atlantic City had "about 3,000" attendees and last years had "more than 2,000."