Bentley Systems Acquires GroupBC for Cloud Services for Construction Information Management

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced the acquisition of GroupBC, a leading UK SaaS software innovator.  For over twenty years, GroupBC’s and Bentley’s software solutions have been deployed for complementary purposes to improve project and asset information management.  The transaction results from GroupBC’s expansion agenda, and Bentley’s investment appetite, for international growth opportunities stemming from the UK’s national initiatives for major infrastructure investment and towards infrastructure digital twins. 

GroupBC’s CDE solutions, BC Projects and BC Enterprise+, have been widely applied in the UK for information management respectively across construction and asset estates.  Largely due to the UK’s substantiated ROI experience and its global thought leadership, CDEs have become increasingly availed globally in “going digital” for capital projects and resulting assets.  In 2019, the UK’s (BS 1192) construction project information management guidelines were largely adopted within the global standard ISO 19650. 

Also, in 2019, in its inaugural study of the overall market for Collaborative BIM, ARC Advisory Group ranked Bentley’s ProjectWise system as #1 worldwide.  The new opportunity is to build on ISO 19650 and GroupBC’s UK information management experience to advance collaborative BIM through “evergreen” digital twins and to span infrastructure lifecycles.  In combination, Bentley’s iTwin Services will now be leveraged to uniquely connect GroupBC CDEs and ProjectWise CDEs.  Through semantic alignment and change synchronization, the resulting digital twins cloud services will securely federate – fully enabling 4D mixed reality and analytics visibility – previously separate CDEs for construction and engineering.