This episode features an interview with Jeff Richardson, Chief Data Officer for Bentley Systems. Jeff has been with Bentley Systems for over 17 years working on enterprise data and data strategies. In this episode Jeff talks about how Bentley Systems has avoided disruption during the COVID crisis, having a “cloud first strategy”, how to use AI to build sustainable infrastructure, and much more.
This episode features an interview with Jeff Richardson, Chief Data Officer for Bentley Systems. Jeff has been with Bentley Systems for over 17 years working on enterprise data and data strategies.
In this episode, Jeff talks about how Bentley Systems has avoided disruption during the COVID crisis, having a “cloud-first strategy”, how to use AI to build sustainable infrastructure, and much more.
--------
How you approach data will define what’s possible for your organization. Data engineers, data scientists, application developers, and a host of other data professionals who depend on the Snowflake Data Cloud continue to thrive thanks to a decade of technology breakthroughs. But that journey is only the beginning.
Attend Snowflake Summit 2023 in Las Vegas June 26-29 to learn how to access, build, and monetize data, tools, models, and applications in ways that were previously unimaginable. Enable seamless alignment and collaboration across these crucial functions in the Data Cloud to transform nearly every aspect of your organization.
Learn more and register at www.snowflake.com/summit
Steve Hamm: [00:00:00] so, Jeff, it was great to meet you yesterday. You know, we had the little warmup session and, uh, we learned that we have a geographical connection.
Jeff Richardson: [00:00:08] We do
Steve Hamm: [00:00:09] I live. Yeah. I live in new Haven, Connecticut. And you grew up right next door in East Haven, kind of a little sister of new Haven and our listeners probably don't know it, but new Haven is famous for pizza.
It has three pizza joints that are frequently ranked in the top 10 in the nation. They're Pepys Sally's and modern. And for me, it's great lock because they're all within walking distance of my house. And everybody in new Haven, or maybe even Connecticut seems to have a favorite when it comes to these three places.
So my first question to you very serious is which is the best pizza in new Haven Pepe Sally's or modern.
Jeff Richardson: [00:00:53] so I just want to start. I am insanely jealous at how close to those places you get to live.
even when I was in Connecticut, I had to drive 10 minutes to get there. And that was just too far. Um, so having been to each of them, dozens, if not hundreds of times, I will very plainly say my favorite is Pepys, but the Pepys that is in new Haven, not any of the satellite Pepys.
Steve Hamm: [00:01:16] yes. Yes. And is your favorite the white clam pizza?
Jeff Richardson: [00:01:20] Eight is not. I like just a regular moots, like very simple. Just, just go in there and get a standard. The old reliable
Steve Hamm: [00:01:28] well, one of the cool things about our neighborhood is. You can just go out the door and you can smell pizza being cooked everywhere. It's really kind of really kind of fun. No matter which way the wind is blowing, it's blowing from a pizza product.
Jeff Richardson: [00:01:40] you may live near the most pizza restaurants in the United States, like within like one block and per house
Steve Hamm: [00:01:47] Yeah. Yeah. The highest concentration. That's right.
Jeff Richardson: [00:01:50] and I would put them all in the top 50 to 25% of pizza in the country.
Steve Hamm: [00:01:54] Oh, I
Jeff Richardson: [00:01:55] You were so lucky.
Steve Hamm: [00:01:57] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. So let's move on to Bentley, but at least systems. Um, I know that Bentley is well known among architecture, engineering and construction firms, but most people and most people among our podcast listeners, uh, probably think of automobiles rather than project management software when they hear the name.
So I think it'd be great if you started off by describing the company and its products.
Jeff Richardson: [00:02:23] Love to. So Bentley systems is a private family owned company that is entirely devoted to improving the world's infrastructure while not the flashiest industry in the world. Infrastructure affects essentially everything. Every human does on the planet from clean water to transportation. Housing and electricity.
So when you think of infrastructure, think of all of the hard physical assets that like drive your life. Um, Bentley was founded in 1984 by the Bentley family, four brothers. Um, and while not the driving Bentley, uh, if you drive anywhere in the United States, you are almost certainly driving on a road that was designed using Bentley software.
Uh, I think 49 of the 50 DLTs in the UK use our software for all road design. Um, so just a couple more facts about BentleyLink just to set the stage there. Um, we're essentially the leading global provider of solutions for, as you said, engineers, architects, geospatial professionals, constructors owner operators, which means we help people design construct and operate, uh, big infrastructure things, bridges and roads, water treatment plants, offshore drilling platforms, utilities.
What potable water, et cetera, and Bentley's products, um, our CAD products and project management, like you touched on there. Um, so MicroStation is a very well known product in that area, but we also have lots of BIM applications, building infrastructure management, which is all data and ties nicely into this conversation.
And then project management and project delivery, which is also just all data management. Um, And then just the last bit of facts there, Bentley employs about 4,000 colleagues around the world. And we now do business in over 170 countries.
Steve Hamm: [00:04:02] let's pick one of the products, you know, maybe, maybe one of the new cloud products, like project wise, three 65 or something else.
It'd be great. If you could kind of go down and describe how. A professional would be using a product like that day to day, because that's going to help us understand, uh, what you have to respond to. You have to deliver in terms of value.
Jeff Richardson: [00:04:24] Absolutely. So with ProjectWise three 65, that's a great example. That's reasonably new. It's very cloud forward. Um, today's infrastructure projects are immensely complicated. Think about how you would run a high speed railway system through the center of London. That's one of the big projects that has.
That we used our software recently, or build a biomass, electrical generating station in Indonesia or in New Jersey. Um, today's engineers have powerful desktop tools to do this design, to, to make these assets. Um, but they need equally powerful tools to coordinate that work because in a building situation like.
Any of those things, you're going to have hundreds or thousands of professionals working together on the same project on the same BIM files, the same databases, the same collaboration. So project wise and specifically project wise, three 65 brings this coordination, um, to projects in a very powerful, but very cloud and mobile based way.
So for many project-wise users of our larger server based applications, I'm pivoting to working from home, for instance, in like a COVID environment with seamless, because most of that is built in cloud native software and enables enabled them to access their critical data and files anywhere they want it to.
Um, so project wise three 65 is a lightweight version of that. And it doesn't have all the full features of project wise, but it's instant on, and it is a hundred percent cloud based and designed for the cloud.
Steve Hamm: [00:05:50] So the way that th the way it works is they actually do the number, crunching the CAD , on their desktop or laptop computers. And then all this collaboration stuff, and the data they need is up in the cloud is not the way it works.
Jeff Richardson: [00:06:03] It can work both ways. So the server based applications we've found are moving to the cloud much faster than the desktop applications. Um, mostly because of, of latency and processing power. So it's, it's reasonably straightforward for someone to do CAD design and analysis locally right now. Um, it's much harder to share those multi gigabyte and terabyte files among people.
If you're doing it. Laptop to laptop or even, you know, servers in a company's physical locations. So collaboration, software and server software moved very quickly to the cloud. Although we are moving almost all of our user-based CAD software into virtual environments, um, cloud-based situations, VMs, Kubernetes, things like that.
Steve Hamm: [00:06:48] Now you mentioned the COVID crisis a moment ago. When I think about the array of products you make for product management, we mentioned the collaboration stuff. You make products that people use to manage buildings or, or even, you know, whole developments, things like this. Um, so I would think that during COVID.
Your products have been extremely useful to a lot of different, you know, operations people in the built environment and also design people. If you could kind of tick through how it's been used over these last couple of months or how they have been used over these last couple of months. I think that would be really interesting.
Jeff Richardson: [00:07:28] Yeah, I'd love to. So specifically with the ProjectWise three 65 offering, that was something new to us that, that we were going to release early this year. And it happened to coincide with the COVID crisis in the shutdown of love, many economies. So I'm very proud to say that Bentley. Took the opposite of advantage of that, and immediately offered that for free to anyone who wanted to use it during that crisis.
Um, specific to your question, I think it's how people used our software during the crisis.
So again, much of our now server-based software is correct native and designed in the cloud. So yeah, while many economies shut down many, many face to face interactions shut down much of the infrastructure that used to run our lives.
Never shut down. Water plants still had to run asset based infrastructure, still had to run like refineries and plants, processing electricity and things. So, yeah. We are very lucky, both ourselves, our users, and most of the world that the software that's designed for that now. And some of that we build, um, seamlessly and, and completely, uh, without disruption in COVID.
So we did notice in local areas, um, certain design, specific locations, those tended to have less usage than normal, but. Predominantly throughout the world, because many of our users were based in cloud technology. They had no disruption when their workers had to work from home versus in the office, because most of them had moved their, their data infrastructure into either our cloud or the public cloud that we use or other cloud providers.
And we were very fortunate with that and our users were very fortunate.
Steve Hamm: [00:09:04] Now you talked before about how Bentley is a global company, all those, all those countries and operates and how has COVID changed the way you operate and how you use technology and how you access the data.
Jeff Richardson: [00:09:17] That is a great question. I actually just put up a LinkedIn article on this because I found that our response to COVID was positively amazing. Um, So we actually haven't changed our operations all that much with covert with, with one exception that I'll get into. Um, but very recently, I think it was about a month ago, Gartner released a report, a study they did on all global companies.
They had done a survey and 97% of companies in the United States experienced major disruptions as lockdowns went into effect either from bandwidth constraints or bottle-necking in licensing network infrastructure. Physical hardware, laptops and things that they, they didn't have good global mobility for their users.
Um, Bentley was one of the 3% of companies that experienced no impact at all from COVID. So we've had a cloud first cloud forward strategy for about a decade now. And our CIO was actually very forward thinking and we were doing tabletop exercises about what would happen, hypothetically, if the U S shut down.
Later in Q1, we were doing those in early January. So we had a little more runway to handle the global mobility crisis that was coming with COVID. Um, and the way we had architected our company, we were very well situated to handle that. Even outside of that. The only difference. The only change we've really seen is our use of Microsoft teams and zoom has shot completely through the roof.
We now run our entire company off of virtual collaboration tools like teams, basically.
Steve Hamm: [00:10:50] Yeah, it's really interesting. I've seen this too, you know, before COVID a lot of people use zoom and they use the other collaboration tools, but often they didn't turn on. They didn't turn on the video, but now, now that we can't see people anymore in person, I see a lot of people turning the video on. And in fact, usually at the beginning of the meeting, everybody has the video on just to kind of establish, Hey, we're a bunch of human beings in this room.
And then maybe if there's a bandwidth issue or, you know, you want to walk and get a drink of water
Jeff Richardson: [00:11:20] Then you turn it off. Once you kind of check that social norm box
I was probably on, I don't know, a couple hundred teams meetings before COVID started and I actually didn't know how to get my laptop camera set up properly. It's got a little lock over it that covers the camera. I didn't even realize that that's how I had never used that.
Steve Hamm: [00:11:38] Yeah, well,
Jeff Richardson: [00:11:38] And then right afterwards. Yeah. Like everyone is, is, is video sharing it, it does create more of a sense of comradery and sort of, um, attention in the meetings, which I, which I like.
Steve Hamm: [00:11:48] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. People that you don't see people doing something. Right, right. You know, very often surfing the web or something like that on their phone. Hey I'm no, you are the chief data officer you've been working for Bentley for more than 16 years. So I want to kind of get a little bit of a history.
What was it that took you to the company and what is it that keeps you there?
Jeff Richardson: [00:12:12] Yeah. So it's actually 17 and a half years. Um, when I graduated college, um, I moved back to Connecticut and I got a degree in computer science and a minor in math. Um, and I started looking for jobs in the software space. I wanted to utilize, obviously what I had just learned. Um, and in Connecticut, I started working for a company called hasted methods, which was a very small CAD software company that, um, built tools for hydraulics and hydrology.
So they built software that designed potable water systems, sanitary and storm systems and hydraulic networks like river basin systems for the army Corps of engineers. That company was actually purchased by Bentley systems 16 years ago. So I've essentially had the same job forever,
Steve Hamm: [00:12:55] yeah.
Jeff Richardson: [00:12:56] um, which I think is great.
Like it, it gives me a lot of space to grow and, and learn more in this company. Um, but also among my friends and peers, I find that I'm the only person who has never changed jobs.
Steve Hamm: [00:13:05] That's really interesting. So it seems like the company is very kind of focused on resilience. I mean, what kind of culture does it have?
Jeff Richardson: [00:13:13] Uh, the, the culture at Bentley is fantastic. most of the people on my team and most of my coworkers have been here in what you would measure in, in decades. Um, so very family oriented company, obviously. Being a family owned company where all of the founders still work at the company, their families work at the company.
They're very much focused on good work life balance. And I think that is very, very important to a lot of people, especially now, like, you know, the COVID crisis, like lots of companies had. Varied reactions to this. And our reaction was very measured and very family focused, which I think a lot of people really appreciate.
Um, but then the flip side of that, the company is also very forward thinking with technology, which is a very big staying reason for me. Um, I want to constantly learn new things and we are constantly pushing the technology envelope to. Use more advanced functions in the cloud, more advanced functions in computing, machine learning, AI predictive processing, power VR.
Um, so it's very exciting to be at a company that has a very nice balance of your family, but also pushes forward with a lot of technology advances.
Steve Hamm: [00:14:20] So you've been chief data officer for about a year. So what does the chief data officer at Bentley do? And how does the company use data?
Jeff Richardson: [00:14:29] So I'm essentially writing possible for the full life cycle of data and data strategies globally for the company that basically means designing, building and implementing the internal and external architecture that is meant to satisfy the information needs of our colleagues and our users.
So as a software company with lots of information that runs the company, our internal users, my internal stakeholders have a tremendous appetite for information. Um, everyone is incredibly data savvy tech savvy, and they want lots of information and our users are running multibillion dollar engineering firms.
And they're looking for information on how they're using software, how projects are working, billing information. So they also have a tremendous appetite for information. So my focus is meant to help satisfy all of those appetites in a way that is scalable and robust, um, and also . Gets everyone what they need to be happy with with their information.
Steve Hamm: [00:15:24] . Now specifically, I mean, you talked about how most of your products are really in the cloud now, where you have cloud versions. What about the, you know, the software you run used to run the business? Is, is it, do you use a lot of cloud stuff? Do you, are you using a lot of data, you know, data in the clouds?
Jeff Richardson: [00:15:40] We are. So we have had a cloud first strategy for about a decade now, which is fairly unique among. Among certainly companies in our industry, in the infrastructure space. I don't want to say in the, in the software space, lots of companies have been cloud first in that space. Um, but we had a very early partnership with Microsoft to get into their cloud when they were rolling out Azure.
We, 15 years ago when we were designing. Software that that allowed companies to share information. We obviously started hosting that in our own data centers. So we would help them host their data in the air quotes cloud, which was our data centers. And we quickly realized that our core competencies weren't hosting other people's infrastructure in our.
Server rooms. It was building software that we could then give them to go be more efficient. So we partnered with Microsoft and a bunch of cloud companies to leverage public and private clouds that we could leverage, build very, very good software and then help our users be more successful with that.
Steve Hamm: [00:16:41] I guess your users shifted their data to the cloud at the same time. Right?
Jeff Richardson: [00:16:46] That was much slower. So we work in an industry where, um, where change either comes because of a crisis like COVID, uh, or because of financial reasons. So it took a little longer to get people comfortable with that. But over the last. Five years out of that 10 to 15 year journey, we have seen global compliance regulations change.
We have seen security regulations changed. There have been lots of financial pressures on companies to be more efficient. So because of all those reasons, we've seen companies get more comfortable with the cloud. Obviously the cloud is now much more ubiquitous and well known, but we are seeing companies, pick up their, their adoption of cloud technologies at a tremendous rate.
Now, And COVID has only, uh, exacerbated that made that even faster now because many companies where they used to have a thousand employees in an office sharing multi gigabyte and petabyte documents. With servers, they had an office, they now have a thousand people at their homes and they don't have the infrastructure to support that anymore.
So I don't know the exact numbers, but I want to say our requests for cloud hosting of other people's services in our, for instance, project wise, infrastructure doubled during COVID
Steve Hamm: [00:17:56] That makes total sense.
Jeff Richardson: [00:17:59] not to make this conversation COVID focused, but it's been a very interesting digital transformation, um, event recently.
Steve Hamm: [00:18:06] This is a big pivot in technology and business and society. And we still don't know where it's going to end up. So, uh, it it's really impressive to hear about how. Bentley has been so forward in its planning around this. I think that's really very impressive. Just think about this for a second. what would happen if we didn't have the internet and we had COVID, I mean, just think about the impact that would have on the world.
Much, much worse, I think, than
Jeff Richardson: [00:18:33] We, we would be in a situation like in 1918 during the, the last pandemic, we would be no different than people would be home and stuck trying to figure out how to get food and like communication would be nonexistent.
Steve Hamm: [00:18:45] Yeah. Yeah. It's just crazy. Yeah. Hey, so I understand that you're the snowflake champion at Bentley. So I want to delve into that a little bit. When and why did you bring in snowflake and how are you using it now?
Jeff Richardson: [00:18:59] Yeah. So a big fan of snowflake, obviously I'm a big fan of any technology that pushes the envelope a little bit farther and advances us farther digitally. Um, so I wouldn't even say I'm the biggest champion anymore. I think the, the people who have been implementing it in our first users are the biggest champions.
Uh, they can't speak highly enough of it. Um, So my initial conversation with snowflake was actually quite a while ago. Um, I remember having a meeting with, um, a guy named Vince Trotter, who I think is his head of sales. Um, about five. Yeah, about five years ago. Vince and I had lunch several times talking about snowflake.
I loved the idea then. Um, but it was a tough sell because we hadn't hit the pain points in our cloud journey yet to justify. Switching to snowflake snowflake was that far ahead of the, of the time, um, where they were predicting problems and predicting a solution that I didn't even think I was going to have, which I think is just great.
Like they were just perfectly positioned for where they are in the world right now.
Steve Hamm: [00:19:58] You mean in terms of volumes of data and concurrency and some of those kinds of
Jeff Richardson: [00:20:02] volumes of data, concurrency capacity and scalability, but also their, their commercial model of how they price and go to market with the technology.
Steve Hamm: [00:20:12] Oh yeah,
Jeff Richardson: [00:20:12] So they've just been, they have been five years ahead of where everyone else needs to be forever. Um, so w obviously cloud first cloud focused, we had been in the cloud with no massive datasets five, 10 years ago, but for the most part that scaled.
Reasonably. Okay. We'd never hit significant bottlenecks, but recently in the last two years, we are now collecting telemetry on our software. Our commercial models for our software are tied very much to, um, pay for what you use. So to do that, we collect very rich telemetry on all of our software. So all of our applications in the field, whether desktop server, client or mobile send back telemetry, some of that is very lightweight, but some of that is very detailed.
Like what features were used, what buttons were clicked, what time series and algorithms were run. And we use that to design better software, but also to make sure that we can bill people for just exactly what they need. So they get the best benefit, very similar to Snowflake's model of pay for what you use. So we are getting gigabytes, hundreds of gigabytes of that data now per day. And internally our developers want access to that to make insightful choices on what to develop. And we're finding that our, our users want access to that data so they can figure out. Where they, they have synergies among work where people know certain skills, things like that.
And we actually hit a critical threshold about two years ago, where we were collecting so much information. We could no longer put it in relational database systems. So we were collecting it and we were storing it in blob storage, just in, in files. And we were just, we were just warehousing it.
We just had petabytes of data sitting in files and data lakes, and nobody could access them. So we've gone through half a dozen iterations to try to get access to that data in a way that is scalable, where we can get one data scientist access to that through spark or something, but it never scaled out to.
A broad consumer base. So we engage with snowflake again about 18 months ago and started some conversations. And about seven months ago, six months ago, we did a very robust proof of concept where we through basically a quarters worth of our biggest data set in there and said, what's going to happen.
How's it going to work? And the responses were phenomenal. Everyone was impressed. The developers that worked on it were, were very impressed with technology and the users had access to so much information that they just couldn't speak highly enough of it. It was fast. It was scalable. It was fantastic.
Steve Hamm: [00:22:40] Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Hey, so let's go, let's drill down into one of these examples. You talked a minute ago about how, uh, the internal users are, you know, people within Bentley who are using snowflake are seeing a high praises let's pick one use case or one, one application. Tell us about it. You know, what was the problem?
How are they using it? How are things different?
Jeff Richardson: [00:23:04] Yup. Yup. So I do want to be, be accurate. We are rolling into production now, so I don't want to overspeak this, but we've been using this in a QA and a pre production environment for about two months now. Um, but we are, when if Bentley users do listen to this or Bentley, employees do listen to this, we are going into production officially this week or next week.
With user access. Um, but we've tested this out robustly with about a hundred people, so we know where we're going to end up.
Steve Hamm: [00:23:31] what was the proof of concept use case?
Jeff Richardson: [00:23:33] So we have two great use cases that we're rolling out at the same time. One is our feature data. This is click level telemetry from our software. This is what our developers use to figure out what features are working, which ones aren't working, what to does, what should develop, what to design and what our end users want access to, to figure out where they have, um, people that are efficiently trained.
So this is literally billions of records per day. In some cases. Dozens of billions of records per month. So we are loading this now into snowflake virtual warehouses, and we are going to give people access to this through any number of tools they want through data bricks and data science tool, click and power BI and through normal, just the snowflake query engine.
Um, and so far where in the past, we literally could not even access this information today. Our users are getting reasonably. Multi-sector and in some cases sub-second responses to tremendous queries, very complicated queries. So that has been very, very well received by our users internally. And then
we offer external reporting to our users so they can see the usage that we're collecting and telemetry very transparent with our users, but also, so we use that to drive their invoicing and their billing. So we have to display to them what we're collecting and how it works. We have a number of reports that we surface through a number of techniques, um, but some of them, and we want to get more real time.
A reporting with more dynamic querying, and we have hundreds and thousands of people accessing these data stores. Now there's no database technology today that we can have that scales to a level of performance that works well. That is also cost effective for when those users access the systems. So we've tried.
You name it. We have tried it in a cloud first cloud only environment, um, to give users the ability to query end users, external users, the ability to query this data through a reporting portal somehow. So we are going to put snowflake underneath some Tellerik controls inside our reporting environment, and we hope.
The test of all proven is very, very, very well. But once we do this, we're going to be able to give users their own virtual warehouses, to run queries that are much more dynamic than they've been able to in the past. Um, and the benefit of this for us is it's much more scalable, easier to control, and the cost is going to be much more competitive than other cloud vendors today.
Steve Hamm: [00:25:58] So I understand that you're exploring the idea of using snowflake marketplace to share data with your customers and for the podcast listeners who don't know what that is. That is a platform that enables third party sellers of data to market their wares and users of data to find the data they need.
And also the various parties to share data easily. What's your scheme, but what's your plan for using it?
Jeff Richardson: [00:26:23] So we have a lot of large organizations who. Who constantly come to us with requests to automate data access, to get access to more stores of information than we've given them before and to partner with data and share data back and forth in some kind of secure environment. So. This is very experimental right now.
It's kind of my own mad scientist idea. But in talking to the CIO, Matt McDonald, a very large engineering firm that we do, um, business with. They want to be able, they want to start more of a data partnership, where they have access to automate data, and we can share information back and forth. More efficiently, more effectively.
So it's very hard to do that with traditional database tools because of security and compliance, scalability, performance, you name it. The problems are endless, but we have been in very carefully testing around the edges, how this might work in snowflake. If they also had a snowflake cluster and we could share data back and forth between those using the marketplace or other.
Built in and native snowflake tools. Again, taking advantage of the best tool for the solution. Best of breed, leveraging snowflake for again, where it's inevitably going to end up being a five-year ahead. Looking visionary.
Steve Hamm: [00:27:38] You know, another thought I have about COVID, you know, here we are in the midst of this crisis and a lot of people are aware that, you know, when COVID goes away, You know, there's like a little wave really, and there's a huge one wave coming after it. And that's the wave of climate change and, and your customers, your clients are deep in the middle, you know, they're designing and operating the built environment.
And there is a clear understanding, I think globally, now that buildings have to be designed. The materials have to be, you know, you know, they have to be designed with sustainability in mind. The materials have to be done with that in mind, the, the energy systems and then how they operate. And I just wondered, I mean, it seems like there's a great opportunity and need for your industries that you serve to use data in a much more aggressive way to be able to accomplish these.
Kind of efficiency and sustainability goals. And also it seems like there's a need and an opportunity for your company is to design new capabilities that will help them meet it. So, you know, we hadn't talked before about, about this topic, but it seems just while we were speaking, it occurred to me that this is something that you've probably been thinking about.
And then I think a lot of other people have been thinking about it. So, so what's the, what's the kind of the climate, the change story.
Jeff Richardson: [00:29:05] so absolutely. Uh, we see our, our users in the companies. We do business with doubling and tripling down on, on Clem at focused and sustainable projects. One of our company taglines is building sustainable infrastructure, and that means sustainable in the sense of long live longevity in roads and bridges, but also sustainable in the sense of building things that sustain the ecosystems that we live in.
So many of our executives and engineers, um, are very well versed in, in, um, lead certifications and environmental design. So much of the technology we develop is focused around that kind of, um, forward-looking climate change, climate focused environment. So. Hardening our infrastructure against everything that could possibly go wrong is a broad topic, but certainly wind and sea and storm events are things that we focus on.
Um, we do a tremendous amount of business now with off shore, uh, structures, which was originally off shore drilling structures, but it's now pivoted. Almost entirely to offshore wind farms and offshore sustainable electric generation systems, wave generation and wind power, for instance.
Steve Hamm: [00:30:18] That's a hardening idea. I gotta tell you. I'm so glad to hear that.
Jeff Richardson: [00:30:22] it's been very interesting watching that transform.
Um, so we also offer lots of, of software that helps to figure out how to build more sustainable electricity delivery and transportation systems. We work with lots of, um, infrastructure that's designed for energy and specifically sustainable energy. Renewables and nuclear power. Um, and then, you know, if, if we are going to, uh, reverse the damage that we've done to our planet already with climate change, most of that is going to come from infrastructure professionals, leveraging.
Better software and better data in that software. So where we see the demands to design and build things that are more efficient, we expect that to grow X number of times over the next five or 10 years, I expect the demands of data to build insights over that, to figure out how to plan that better leverage machine learning and genetic algorithms to, to, to better design climate specific climate focused.
Infrastructure. That's going to expand by 10 20, a hundred X over the next five years. The, the desire for that information, the need for that information, putting that into insightful systems is, is going to be nearly infinite.
Steve Hamm: [00:31:34] no. You mentioned AI there. You know, we always like to finish by asking our guests to look, to be visionaries, really, and to look five years or more into the future. And almost everybody talks about AI and just seeing how, I mean it's. Yeah. Well, I think one of our guests said, you know, people used to say the software was eating the world.
Now people say that AI is eating software. How do you see AI machine learning, whatever technologies, how do you see it affecting the way you use data and the way your customers use data?
Jeff Richardson: [00:32:09] Sure. So AI in the CAD industry is actually old hat. So there've been genetic algorithms for doing CAD design for probably two decades now. So when I. I worked at hasted methods, the, the water company, um, we had algorithms that used w at the time was, would, would now be considered AI to build genetic water distribution systems.
They did recursion and things to figure out how to best build those systems. But we see that quite a bit. Now there's many white papers on buildings and, and, uh, specifically sustainable buildings that are built using machine learning, AI, genetic components that. Figure out ways to build them that are more efficient for wind resistance or other sustainable things that I'm sure I'm not going to eloquently explain.
Um, so I think that's gonna gonna certainly double, triple increase in capacity going forward, um, where I see the most benefit from AI in the infrastructure, uh, arena. It's going to be how those things are used to make efficient design with materials with, with the actual building of those applications.
So the, the design of a building or of a, of a wind, the blade on a, um, on a wind farm, that's probably efficient. It already uses AI, but how are those things manufactured? How are they distributed? How is the process done to build those, build those? I think that's where AI is going to be. Certainly more used going forward.
Um, and then on the flip side of that, as technology gets advances where we are seeing more AI and machine learning is, is in digital. So people using drones and, um, different ways of capturing digital information point clouds, satellite data, geospatial data to. Load those pictures up and use AI and all kinds of predictive algorithms to do faster design using new technology.
We have a product called context capture where if you take 500 pictures of a cell phone tower, it will use a machine learning algorithm to build a CAD model of that, and then optimize it.
Steve Hamm: [00:34:14] You know, people been talking about the magic of the internet of things for a couple of decades. And, uh, you know, this is the idea that sensors can be attached to all sorts of physical devices and infrastructure in the world so that we can really understand what's happening in real time.
for many years it was kind of, a lot of it was just talk. But my sense is that in the past couple of years, just, you know, the amount of sensors, the amount of stuff that's being collected, also new new sources of information off of drones. You mentioned drones. What are you saying with IOT data and how was your software rising up to meet the demand for, for dealing with that kind of stuff?
Jeff Richardson: [00:34:56] Yeah. So what we're seeing is that data science is now the fastest growing area in infrastructure technology. Um, most of the new bridges that have been built around New York city are now fully censored IOT devices sending back telemetry to the owners of those bridges through all the various software applications.
Many of them. We have built and created for them, um, monitoring BridgeHealth for instance, and deciding when to commence repairs is now a new field in infrastructure. So you'll recall in the news over the last. Five or 10 years, all of the bridge failures we've had because our infrastructure in the United States for instance, is 50, 60 years old as we repurpose that.
And as infrastructure is rebuilt, all of that now is becoming aware of itself with these IOT devices. So think of a subway system now that gets built anywhere in the world. I had mentioned, uh, the transport for London, but any subway system now is essentially just. An assembly of millions of fixed and moving assets and monitoring those systems, bridges, subways, whatever, and predicting failures means the difference between a normal day and one with huge delays or catastrophes.
So infrastructure, what we're seeing is has rapidly pivoted from a run to fail mindset, to a highly censored IOT predictive approach that is just streaming data back everywhere, back into systems that need to be analyzed stored. And then used for more fill in the insights back into that system.
Steve Hamm: [00:36:25] . Yeah. You know, a decade ago, everybody was talking about smarter cities, smarter planet, all that kind of stuff. And this is another one of those things where, you know, kind of, maybe the marketing gets ahead of the reality, but it seems like we, we truly do have. Smarter infrastructure, smarter cities these days.
And I think that's only gonna increase. And of course, the need to, to respond to climate change and things like that is going to be absolutely necessary that we have that data that we use that data and we can use it to kind of optimize our world. So
Jeff Richardson: [00:36:56] It is truly all about the data.
Steve Hamm: [00:36:58] Yeah. Yeah. Hey dude, I'm thinking about this. Almost all your customers, you know, they're operating in environments that are very complex. There's a, it's in a natural environment is in a built environment. It's surrounded by other pieces of infrastructure. And, you know, I've been thinking recently learning recently about complexity theory and about just the whole idea of understanding how systems.
Operate kind of internally and then how they enter depend on each other. And it seems to me, is, is this something that with your software you're increasingly having to address for your customers to help them understand maybe some unintended consequences or even environmental consequences of things that they do?
Is that an area that you're looking into as well?
Jeff Richardson: [00:37:49] Oh, absolutely. So we have, um, We have integration points in much of our software that specific to buildings. For instance, in complexity theory, as they're designing things will help surface what it predicts to be problems that will arise from conflicting design situations. So if you have a team of structural engineers designing something one way and a team of process engineers designing it another way, and a team of electrical engineers running all the cables and raceways in a building, those may not mesh together very well.
And you may have. Some Raceway that goes through a girder in the middle of a building. So we have algorithms in the software that try to find those and surface those errors. And that we've had that for a couple of years now. Um, and then outside of that, in the, in the environment world, we have a number of products now through recent acquisitions that do exactly what you're talking about and try to predict where there will be issues, either environmental issues down the road, like runoff from, from repaving, a parking lot, or changing the hydrology of an area, um, or just.
The, the materials that things are built on. So the structural materials in the land that a building might be built on or around
Steve Hamm: [00:39:03] so Jeff, this has been really a great conversation. I absolutely love your enthusiasm. it was very interesting to learn about how Bentley really, um, very early anticipated the, some of the issues that would come and COBIT, and really made itself, uh, resilient to it.
And so it wasn't really affected by it at all. That was very impressive. I love when you talked about. Kind of gathering the feature level, telemetry data from, you know, how all your customers are using your software right down into the clicks and all the features. It's just another example of big data analytics that a lot of people don't even think about, but under the covers, this is happening.
And the idea that you can use it both to design your software and also to build people more granularly. I think those are interesting things. And then also the other thing I thought was fascinating was just the news that a lot of the stuff that's going on at sea, the new stuff isn't, you know, oil platforms.
it's wind turbines and it's a wave energy capture devices and things like that. So just, you know, people think may, they may think of, you know, the built environment, the infrastructure is kind of a. Stolid, you know, thing, but man, there's a lot of dynamism there and there a lot of data that makes that dynamism possible.
So, I mean, I think this has really been a fascinating conversation. I wanted this. Thank you for spending time with us. I think people find it very interesting.
Jeff Richardson: [00:40:30] Yeah, Steve, I thank you as well. This has been a fantastic conversation. I love talking about this stuff. And talking with you is, was just. Very very interesting.
Steve Hamm: [00:40:39] Yeah. I think I'm going to go out and grab a pizza now.
Jeff Richardson: [00:40:41] I could not be more upset with you right now.
Steve Hamm: [00:40:46] Okay. Well, thanks again,
Jeff Richardson: [00:40:47] Thank you Steve. Very much. Enjoy the pizza. Send me a picture.