Major investment in plant design software vendor

Bentley Systems has purchased an equity stake in Rebis, representing Rebis' largest outside shareholding, and the company will now incorporate and distribute Microstation V8

Bentley Systems and Rebis have announced that Bentley has purchased an equity stake in Rebis, representing Rebis' largest outside shareholding.

Rebis' plant design applications support both Bentley's Microstation and the Autocad software platform from Autodesk, which has also maintained its long-standing investment as a Rebis stockholder.

The announcement took place at the outset of Daratech's annual Plant Lifecycle Strategy conference, attended by over 900 executives and professionals who lead the plant facilities marketplace worldwide.

"We have made this strategic investment in Rebis because expanding our market-leading footprint in plant design is key to our plans for future growth," said Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems.

"Rebis has an outstanding product line as well as a notable track record, under Dr Jeffrey Hollings, in maintaining steady revenue growth and profitability.

Their achievement of overall revenue growth in 2001 of over 15%, while increasing their consistently positive operating margins, is very noteworthy.

While Bentley itself attained similar 2001 growth in revenues and margins, this was a relatively rare accomplishment among software companies.

We are thus very pleased to establish this shareholding in Rebis, which we expect will increase growth even faster in 2002." "Rebis' Autoplant design solutions provide a very attractive 3D design alternative for many Microstation users that are involved in process plant design and offer another reason for users in this industry to consider Microstation.

We also share with Rebis a distinctive commitment to Autodesk users.

The current and future focus of this relationship will focus on the interchangeability between DGN and DWG formats.

For instance, the Inroads application products of our Bentley Civil unit, acquired last year from Intergraph, are available for Autocad as well as Microstation," added Bentley.

As part of the new relationship, Rebis will incorporate and distribute Microstation V8, which was released by Bentley in October 2001 with the unprecedented capability to transparently edit and cross-reference both Microstation's DGN and Autocad's DWG formats, enabling them to be commingled across the same "hybrid" distributed engineering project.

The Microstation V8 bundling arrangement enables Rebis to offer, for the first time, complete turnkey design solutions.

"We have brought and will continue to bring process design solutions to thousands of Autodesk customers around the world," said Dr Jeffrey Hollings, President and CEO of Rebis.

"We have also long offered Microstation-based versions of our principal products, which we, and our users, believe offer practical and effective deployments for projects of any scale." "This new relationship with Bentley will broaden our ability to provide powerful value in design solutions for users of Microstation, substantially creating an additional market for Rebis.

Our future together will focus on developing industry solutions, and will not undermine our long-standing relationship with Autodesk or Autocad users.

Working closely with Autodesk and Bentley, we will broaden our product lines and define the future for interoperability," said Hollings.

In addition, Rebis expects Bentley's engineering content management and content publishing server solutions to bring common capabilities to a community that is often required to span the two environments.

Rebis users will be able to use Bentley server products to manage and publish engineering content created with either Autocad or Microstation, and establish integrated workflows with mission critical enterprise systems.

As both Bentley and Rebis end a strong financial year, Daratech's new plant-creation-revenue software vendor rankings indicate that Bentley, Rebis, and Autodesk respectively earned the #2, #4, and #5 positions (in terms of market presence) for 2001.

Bentley and Rebis are also forecasted by Daratech to be among the top three overall plant design software sector firms in 2002-dollar growth.

At Daratechplant2002, Bentley and Rebis will host a luncheon on Tuesday, January 29th, where Greg Bentley and Dr Jeffrey Hollings will formally introduce their new relationship.

Bentley and Hollings will address current and future support for Autodesk clients, joint priorities and programs, and the challenge of reducing the plant creation industry's burden imposed by the difficulty of coping with hybrid Microstation and Autocad environments, prior to Microstation V8 and this new alliance.

At the same event, the two companies will demonstrate the incorporation of their technology.

This will include a demonstration on the integration of Bentley PlantSpace and the Rebis Autoplant Process and Instrumentation database.

Furthermore, Bentley will demonstrate the use of a Rebis Autoplant 3D model within Bentley Enterprise Navigator and reference a native Autoplant 3D model within the Plantspace 3D environment without translation.

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