Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business
Our Business
Bentley Systems is the infrastructure engineering software company.
Our purpose is to advance the world’s infrastructure for better quality of life. We empower people to design, build, and operate better and more resilient infrastructure through the adoption of our intelligent digital twin solutions.
We were founded in 1984 by the Bentley brothers and on September 25, 2020, we completed our initial public offering (“IPO”).
Our enduring commitment is to develop and support the most comprehensive portfolio of integrated software offerings across professional disciplines, project and asset lifecycles, infrastructure sectors, and geographies. Our software enables digital workflows across engineering disciplines, across distributed project teams, and from offices to the field. Moreover, our intelligent digital twin solutions empower our users to achieve sustainable development goals (“SDGs”) by realizing outcomes that are more sustainable and resilient.
Our users design, build, and operate projects and assets across the following infrastructure sectors:
• Public Works/Utilities , which represents approximately 58% of our sector-attributable annualized recurring revenues (“ARR”) (1)(2) , includes roads, rail, bridges, tunnels, airports, and ports; federal, state, and municipal agencies; and networks for electricity, gas, water, wastewater, and communications;
• Resources , which represents approximately 26% of our sector-attributable ARR (1)(2) , includes mining, oil and gas “upstream,” offshore, pipelines, environmental management, and renewable energy;
• Industrial , which represents approximately 10% of our sector-attributable ARR (1)(2) , includes process and discrete manufacturing, oil and gas “downstream,” and power generation; and
• Commercial/Facilities , which represents approximately 6% of our sector-attributable ARR (1)(2) , includes campuses, office buildings, retail facilities, and hospitals.
Our Products and Solutions
We serve enterprises and professionals across the infrastructure lifecycle by improving project delivery and asset performance. For projects, our software encompasses conception, planning, surveying, design, engineering, and construction, as well as the collaboration required to coordinate and share the work of interdisciplinary and/or distributed project teams. For assets, our software spans the operating life of commissioned infrastructure assets, allowing our accounts to manage engineering changes for safety and compliance and to model performance and reliability to support operations and maintenance decisions.
(1) Refer to the section titled “Key Business Metrics” included in Part II, Item 7 of this Annual Report on Form 10‑K for additional information, including our definition and our use of ARR.
(2) Sector-attributable ARR refers to the proportion of our ARR which can be attributed either based on the sector-specific classification of the account and/or the sector-specific classification of the product giving rise to the ARR. The portions of our ARR which cannot be sector-attributed consist generally of ARR within accounts that are diversified engineering firms which work in multiple sectors, and as to that portion of their ARR which are for products that are not sector-specific, such as MicroStation, and structural or geotechnical modeling and simulation applications, and ProjectWise, which are used across any and all sectors.
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Our engineering and geoprofessional applications are primarily cloud-connected desktop modeling and simulation applications that support the breadth of engineering and geoprofessional disciplines. Bentley Infrastructure Cloud , provided via cloud and hybrid environments, extends enterprise collaboration during project delivery, and helps manage engineering information during operations and maintenance. Powering these products and solutions is iTwin Platform , our cloud‑native technology platform to create, curate, and leverage infrastructure digital twins.
The proportions of our revenue generated respectively from engineering and geoprofessional applications for modeling and simulation, and from Bentley Infrastructure Cloud and its principal offerings, are referenced in the diagram below.
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Our comprehensive portfolio of integrated software offerings comprises:
Engineering Applications . We offer an open modeling environment comprising domain‑specific authoring applications and an open simulation environment comprising applications to analyze the functional performance of designs that work together to improve engineering quality, streamline production of multi-discipline documentation, and reduce rework. These Bentley Open applications for modeling and simulation support a wide variety of file formats – both Bentley and third‑party – and industry standards and design codes, enabling digital workflows across design, simulation, and analysis, and ensuring engineering data is not locked in, but remains open and accessible.
Our engineering applications work together to improve infrastructure engineering quality and productivity, resulting in better project designs and deliverables. We take care to enable compatibility across successive generations of our applications, which enables engineers, throughout their careers, to maintain continuity with their preferred interfaces, formats, and methodologies, while advancing their work at the leading edge of innovation.
Our open modeling applications include:
• MicroStation , for flexible 3D design and documentation, providing the common modeling environment upon which our applications are built;
• OpenBridge , for the 3D design and documentation of bridges;
• OpenBuildings , for the 3D design and documentation of buildings and their integrated structural, HVAC, electrical, and plumbing systems;
• OpenCities, for the design and visualization of cities and campuses;
• OpenComms , for the planning, engineering, construction, and maintenance of fiber, coax, and hybrid fiber-coax networks;
• OpenFlows , for the planning, design, and operation of water, wastewater, and stormwater systems, incorporating hydrological, hydraulic, and flood modeling;
• OpenPlant , for the 2D and 3D design and documentation of process plants;
• OpenRail , for the planning, 3D design, and documentation of rail and transit systems;
• OpenRoads , for the planning, 3D design, and documentation of roads and highways;
• OpenSite , for the planning, 3D design, and documentation of building, residential development, and infrastructure sites;
• OpenTower , for the 3D design and analysis of communication towers;
• OpenTunnel , for the 3D design and analysis of tunnels;
• OpenUtilities , for the design and management of electric, gas, water, wastewater, and district energy networks; and
• OpenWindPower , for the structural analysis and design of fixed and floating offshore wind turbines.
Our open simulation applications include:
• ADINA , for nonlinear simulation and analysis;
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• AutoPIPE , for analysis and simulation of pipe stress in industrial process plants;
• CUBE , for multi‑modal transportation network modeling and land‑use modeling;
• DYNAMEQ , for traffic simulation and dynamic traffic analysis;
• EMME , for multimodal urban, regional, and transport planning;
• LEGION , for pedestrian traffic simulation;
• Power Line Systems (“PLS”) , for analysis and simulation of overhead electric power transmission lines and their structures;
• RAM , for analysis and simulation of building structural performance;
• SACS , for analysis and simulation of offshore structural performance;
• SPIDA , for analysis and simulation of utility poles and overhead assets; and
• STAAD , for analysis and simulation of infrastructure.
Geoprofessional Applications . Our geoprofessional applications support modeling and simulation to help engineers and scientists develop a detailed understanding, and take full account of, near and deep subsurface conditions.
These include industry‑leading earth modeling, subsurface‑data management, and geoprofessional team collaboration software and geotechnical products that supplement visible built-asset representations above ground with more probabilistic modeling of subsurface conditions – deepening the potential of infrastructure digital twins.
Our geoprofessional applications include:
• AGS , for processing, inversion, and visualization of geophysical data;
• Central , for geological model management, to visualize, track, integrate, and manage geoscience data from a centralized, auditable environment;
• GeoStudio , for integrated geotechnical analysis of slope stability, groundwater flow, and heat and mass transfer in soil and rock;
• Imago , for the capture and management of drilling core images;
• Leapfrog , for 3D implicit modeling designed to rapidly integrate, communicate, and interpret geological data;
• MX Deposit , cloud drill hole software for simplifying and controlling how drill and other field data is collected, managed, and shared throughout the lifecycle of an ore deposit from early exploration through to mine production;
• Oasis montaj , for the quality control, correction, visualization, analysis, and interpretation of geophysical, geologic and geochemical data;
• OpenGround , for geotechnical information management for collecting, reporting, managing, visualizing, analyzing, and accessing geotechnical data; and
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• PLAXIS , for geotechnical analysis to solve common and complex geotechnical problems, including advanced analysis for excavations, foundations, tunnels, and other infrastructure projects.
Bentley Infrastructure Cloud . Our enterprise information systems span the end‑to‑end lifecycle and value chain of the world’s infrastructure, helping engineers to produce higher quality deliverables, contractors to execute better with their supply chain, and owners to have a complete picture of their asset as early as possible.
Bentley Infrastructure Cloud encompasses:
• ProjectWise , for project delivery, supporting information and document management, and engineering‑specific collaboration and work‑sharing for distributed project teams and enterprises;
• SYNCHRO , for construction, spatially and temporally integrating a project’s 3D engineering models into its construction schedules to visualize and assess sequencing strategies; and
• AssetWise , for asset operations, capturing and managing changes to engineering models and enterprise information for compliance and safety, and to model performance and reliability.
By unifying data between engineering applications and enterprise systems, Bentley Infrastructure Cloud helps organizations manage their data in a single environment, enabling integrated workflows, improved collaboration, and increased productivity. Data also can be easily enriched throughout the lifecycle. Powered by the iTwin Platform and Bentley’s infrastructure schemas and thus seamlessly integrating with Bentley Open applications, Bentley Infrastructure Cloud enables better creation, delivery, and ongoing operation of better infrastructure, through complete and evergreen digital twins.
Bentley iTwin Platform. Our iTwin Platform for infrastructure digital twin solutions, leveraging our infrastructure schemas, enables users to create and curate cloud‑native 4D/5D digital representations of physical infrastructure assets, incorporating underlying engineering information federated with operational and enterprise data, and then to model, simulate, analyze, synchronize, track, and predict performance over time. Using digital twins, our users can more fully extend digital workflows across the entire infrastructure lifecycle, increasing the value of infrastructure engineers’ work.
Bentley iTwin Platform powers Bentley Infrastructure Cloud to add digital twin capabilities to our offerings for project delivery, construction, and asset operations. It also supports an emerging ecosystem of third‑party developers who use iTwin.js, an open‑source development library, to develop desktop, mobile, or web apps that leverage the iTwin Platform or that augment our iTwin products or those from third parties.
Some capabilities of the iTwin Platform are offered as discrete iTwin products. These include:
• iTwin Capture , for capturing, modeling, analyzing, and sharing reality data, enabling users to easily create engineering‑ready, high-resolution 3D meshes of infrastructure assets using drone video and survey imagery;
• iTwin Experience , for visualizing and navigating digital twins, empowering owner‑operators and their constituents with insights into critical infrastructure; and
• iTwin IoT , for acquiring and analyzing sensor data, enabling users to seamlessly incorporate Internet of Things (“IoT”) data created by sensors and condition monitoring devices for real-time safety and risk monitoring in infrastructure operations and construction activities.
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Comprehensiveness of Our Offerings
Our offerings are comprehensive across professional disciplines, lifecycle stages, infrastructure sectors, and geographies, resulting in what we believe to be durable competitive advantages:
Professional Disciplines . Each infrastructure project requires seamless and deep collaboration among professional disciplines, which can include civil, structural, geotechnical, subsurface, and process engineers; architects; geospatial professionals; city and regional planners; contractors; fabricators; and operations and maintenance engineers. Our open modeling and open simulation applications facilitate iterative interactions between disciplines and coordination across project participants. Additionally, we believe our collaboration systems lead the market in managing infrastructure engineering firms’ preferred work-in-progress workflows.
Lifecycle Stages. Both project delivery enterprises and owner‑operators benefit from our software, which enables digital workflows to extend between project and asset lifecycles, from design to construction and ultimately asset management. This capability allows our users’ digital engineering models to be leveraged as the context for real-time condition monitoring to achieve better and safer operations and maintenance.
Infrastructure Sectors. Most major engineering and project delivery firms pursue an ever‑changing mix of projects across the public works/utilities, industrial, resources, and commercial/facilities sectors and for flexibility tend to favor an infrastructure engineering software vendor whose portfolio correspondingly spans their full breadth. This comprehensiveness provides diversification for our own business, as an incidental advantage. For example, when there have been cyclical downturns in the primarily privately‑financed industrial, resources, and commercial/facilities sectors, we have historically witnessed offsetting counter‑cyclical government investment in public works/utilities.
Geographies. While design codes may vary by country, infrastructure purposes and engineering practices are fundamentally the same throughout the world, which makes it possible for our infrastructure modeling applications to be used globally. Our offerings are available in most major languages, supporting country‑specific design codes, standards, and conventions. Our development teams are also globally dispersed, due in part to acquisitions made in various countries, but also to provide any needed last-mile localization of our applications. Our global comprehensiveness enables our project delivery accounts to compete more efficiently across geographic markets, thus also providing global supply‑chain sourcing choices for owners.
The Digital Twins Opportunity
Over our company’s history, as computing capabilities have advanced, the scope of infrastructure engineering software has correspondingly increased. However, project and asset lifecycle software markets have developed independently from one another and connecting digital workflows have not been offered. We believe the advancement from siloed project-specific software including for computer-aided design (CAD) and building information modeling (BIM), and asset-specific software including for geographic information systems (GIS), to unified and “evergreen” infrastructure digital twins will have the effect of merging what have been to date separate market spaces as well as enabling new use cases that were not possible or practical with previous technologies.
We believe that the growing adoption of infrastructure digital twins will serve to overcome the factors that have held back the digital advancement of infrastructure engineering and will facilitate the broader use of engineering data in the operation of infrastructure assets. Moreover, we believe that due to the comprehensiveness of our offerings across project and asset lifecycles, infrastructure digital twins and newly enabled digital workflows spanning design, construction, and operations will most particularly benefit our users and enhance our competitiveness.
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Our Commercial Offerings
Licensing and Subscriptions
We offer a variety of licensing and subscription options so that users can choose what works best for them, their project, and their organization.
For larger organizations with centralized management of their engineering software portfolio, we offer our Enterprise 365 (“E365”) subscription. Our E365 subscription is an all‑inclusive global consumption‑based plan which provides access to our comprehensive portfolio of solutions with uniform pricing across all countries. E365 subscriptions require a Cloud Services Subscription (“CSS”) (as described below) and are charged to accounts primarily based upon daily usage or elective subscriptions, dependent on product. They are also inclusive of “Success Plans” (described below). Our ProjectWise and AssetWise enterprise collaboration solutions utilized under E365 are charged based on the total number of users within a calendar quarter, or fixed asset bands, respectively. While the majority of our E365 subscriptions revenue is attributed to daily consumption of our applications, E365 subscriptions can contain floors or collars on usage charges.
A perpetual license for Bentley software is a one‑time purchase with an annual maintenance subscription, called SELECT, which includes 24/7 technical support, access to learning resources, and the ability to exchange licenses for other software once a year. In addition, SELECT offers license pooling, which enables software access from multiple computers, and term licenses, which enables users to access software beyond their license entitlements for monthly or quarterly periods to cover short‑term surges in their workload.
We also offer a 12‑month named-user subscription including license, training, and knowledgeable engineering support procured through our e‑store, Virtuosity, which is a convenient and cost‑effective way for infrastructure professionals in small‑ and medium‑sized businesses (“SMBs”) to access Bentley software.
We deliver our Bentley Infrastructure Cloud capabilities under our CSS, charged quarterly based on the number of users of various levels of functionality. Pricing includes cloud provisioning, although some accounts elect on‑premises and/or hybrid hosting.
CSS streamlines the procurement, administration, and payment process for us and our accounts for cloud offerings, term licenses, and recurring services. Participants in our E365 program use CSS as the funding mechanism for their subscription. At the end of 2023, accounts representing approximately 60% of our total ARR (1) had chosen to institute, for licensing of our software, our commercial models eligible under CSS.
Success Plans and Services
For enterprise accounts, we have transitioned from a traditional paradigm of on‑demand technical support, and professional services contracted episodically, to instead delivering proactive and continuous engagement with users and accounts through “Success Plans.” Success Plans are designed with business outcomes in mind, ensuring that accounts receive the best results from our software. Working collaboratively with our accounts, our User Success specialists, consisting of over 600 colleagues, most with domain experience and credentials in infrastructure engineering, deliver Success Plans through structured engagements based on explicit and standardized “Success Blueprints” that include virtual or in‑person engagements with subject matter experts. Success Plans, based on allotted credits toward multiple Success Blueprints per calendar quarter, are bundled into our E365 subscription.
We also offer specialized digital integration services and consulting through our Cohesive business unit (described in more detail below), primarily to accounts that use IBM Maximo and our AssetWise solutions for managing their infrastructure asset operations and maintenance.
(1) Refer to the section titled “Key Business Metrics” included in Part II, Item 7 of this Annual Report on Form 10‑K for additional information, including our definition and our use of ARR.
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Our Primary Growth Initiatives
Incremental to our long‑standing programmatic acquisition strategy, since 2020 we have determinedly invested internal resources to accelerate organic growth, with increasing success, through the following primary growth initiatives:
• Accretion in Enterprise Accounts : We have established that E365 helps our accounts implement, propagate, and upgrade our solutions more quickly, encouraging greater consumption of our software and stronger account relationships. We intend to continue to expand the reach of our E365 subscription within virtually all of our enterprise accounts;
• Accretion in SMBs : New business from SMB accounts, including from hundreds of new “logos” each quarter, has become a substantial contributor to our overall ARR growth (1) , and we are encouraged to continue investment in our Virtuosity business and e‑store. Development and deployment of a “low touch” and ultimately “no touch” digital experience will enable this business to further scale and align with the market potential; and
• Catalyzing the Infrastructure Digital Twin Ecosystem: While engineering services firms (which make up approximately half of our existing business) agree that digital twins are fundamental to the evolution of infrastructure engineering, they tend to lack firsthand experience of introducing data‑centric offerings to owner‑operators or examples of successful business models. Cohesive represents our own investment to create a captive “digital integrator” to prove business models that we can subsequently impart to engineering services firms, accelerating the adoption of intelligent digital twin solutions.
Our Accounts
We provide our software solutions to over 41,000 accounts in 194 countries worldwide. Our revenues are balanced and diversified between engineering and construction contracting firms who work together to deliver the design and construction of capital projects (representing 50%, 50%, and 56% of our 2023, 2022, and 2021 total revenues, respectively), and their clients, the world’s public and private infrastructure asset owners and operators (representing 50%, 50%, and 44% of our 2023, 2022, and 2021 total revenues, respectively).
We bring our offerings to market primarily through direct sales channels, including through our account managers and our Virtuosity inside sales colleagues and e‑store, which generated approximately 92% of our 2023 total revenues. We also rely on specialist channel partners in geographic regions where we do not currently have a meaningful presence or where, for some of our offerings, direct sales efforts are less economically feasible. Channel partners accounted for approximately 8% of our 2023 total revenues.
We do not have material account concentration. No account, including any group of accounts under common control or accounts that are affiliates of each other, represented more than 2.0% of our total revenues in 2023 or 2022, or more than 2.5% of our total revenues in 2021.
(1) Refer to the section titled “Key Business Metrics” included in Part II, Item 7 of this Annual Report on Form 10‑K for additional information, including our definition and our use of ARR growth rate.
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Our Acquisitions
Since our founding, we have purposefully pursued a strategy of regularly acquiring and integrating specialized infrastructure engineering software businesses, including 22 acquisitions over the past three years. Most acquired products had already been interfacing with our platform prior to acquisition, and our acquisition purpose is typically to improve their technical and commercial integration.
As a public company, we have been able to make platform acquisitions which appreciably increase our scale and/or the scope of our platform capabilities. Our platform acquisitions have been:
• Seequent Holdings Limited (“Seequent”) (2021), to enable infrastructure digital twin capabilities to incorporate modeling and simulation of full subsurface depths, and advancing infrastructure resilience and sustainability by helping geoprofessionals to understand environmental conditions and to mitigate environmental risks; and
• PLS (2022), to bring design, analysis, and management of overhead electric power transmission lines and structures to our grid digital twin solutions. PLS substantially completes the reach of our comprehensive portfolio for the lifecycle integration of grid infrastructure across electrical transmission, substation, and distribution assets, and communications towers.
Our relatively numerous and frequent programmatic acquisitions, which most often “fill white space” within our ecosystem, add their value principally by enhancing our platform comprehensiveness, and accordingly we consider this programmatic aspect of our growth as characteristically within our mainstream business performance (unlike platform acquisitions). Our average historical ARR growth rate (1) from programmatic acquisitions over the past three years has been approximately 1% measured on a constant currency basis.
Our Competition
The market for our software is highly competitive and subject to change. We compete against large, global, publicly‑traded companies that have resources greater than our own, and against small, new, or geographically‑focused firms that specialize in developing niche software offerings. While we do not believe that any competitor offers a portfolio as comprehensive as ours, we do face strong competition, varying by infrastructure lifecycle phase and sector:
• our key competitors in Public Works/Utilities applications include Autodesk, Inc., Trimble Inc., and Hexagon AB;
• our key competitors in Resources applications include Hexagon AB, the AVEVA unit of Schneider Electric, and Dassault Systèmes;
• our key competitors in Industrial applications include Hexagon AB, the AVEVA unit of Schneider Electric, and Dassault Systèmes;
• our key competitors in Commercial/Facilities applications include Autodesk, Inc., Nemetschek SE, and Trimble Inc.;
• our key competitors in project delivery systems include Autodesk, Inc. and Oracle Corporation; and
• our key competitors in asset performance systems include Aspen Technology, Inc., the AVEVA unit of Schneider Electric, Esri, and General Electric Company.
(1) Refer to the section titled “Key Business Metrics” included in Part II, Item 7 of this Annual Report on Form 10‑K for additional information, including our definition and our use of ARR growth rate.
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The principal competitive factors affecting our market include:
• product features, performance, and effectiveness;
• reliability and security;
• openness and the ability to integrate with other technologies;
• price, commercial model, and total cost of use; and
• brand awareness and reputation.
We believe we compete favorably against our competitors based on the factors above and that we distinguish ourselves through the comprehensiveness of our software portfolio, our commitment to both integration and interoperability across the entire infrastructure lifecycle, our flexible commercial models, and our direct sales channels.
Our Research and Development
We make substantial investments in research and development because we believe the infrastructure engineering software market presents compelling opportunities for the application of new technologies that advance our current solutions. Our research and development roadmap balances technological advances and new offerings with continuous enhancements to existing offerings. Our allocation of research and development resources is guided by management‑established priorities, input from product managers, and feedback from various channels including users and user-facing teams.
As part of our resource allocation process, we also conduct a cost‑benefit analysis of acquiring available technology in the marketplace versus developing our own solutions.
Our Intellectual Property
We believe that the success of our business depends more on the quality of our proprietary software, technology, processes, and domain expertise than on copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. While we consider our intellectual property rights to be valuable, we do not believe that our competitive position depends primarily on obtaining legal protection for our software and technology. Instead, we believe that our competitive position depends primarily on our ability to maintain a leadership position by developing innovative proprietary software, technology, information, processes, and know‑how. Nevertheless, we rely on a combination of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets in the United States (“U.S.”) and other jurisdictions to secure our intellectual property, and we use contractual provisions and non‑disclosure agreements to protect it. As of December 31, 2023, we had 168 patents granted and 60 patents pending in the U.S., the first of which expires on June 28, 2024, and 33 patents granted and 59 patents pending internationally, the first of which expires on January 12, 2025. In addition, from time to time we enter into collaboration arrangements and in‑bound licensing agreements with third parties, including certain of our competitors, in order to expand the functionality and interoperability of our software solutions. We are not substantially dependent upon any one of these arrangements, and we are not obligated to pay any material royalty or license fees with respect to them.
Our patents cover systems and methods relating to various aspects of software for infrastructure design and modeling, collaboration and work‑sharing, and infrastructure asset operations. Among other things, our patents address a broad range of issues in infrastructure domains from analyzing building energy usage and structural analysis, railway system maintenance, water network design and operation, and augmented reality, as well as techniques for creating, storing, displaying, and processing infrastructure models.
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To innovate and increase our strategic position, our software developers are incentivized to alert our internal patent committee to innovations that might be patentable or of strategic value. In 2023, our patent committee reviewed 16 invention disclosures submitted by our software developers, and filed 15 U.S. and 12 foreign patent applications, while 14 U.S. and six foreign patents were granted. We also plan to assess appropriate occasions for seeking patent and other intellectual property protections for aspects of our technology and solutions that we believe constitute innovations providing significant competitive advantages. We have registered 171 trademarks, including “Bentley,” the Bentley logo, “AssetWise,” “Bentley Infrastructure Cloud,” “Bentley Open,” “iTwin,” “MicroStation,” “ProjectWise,” “Seequent,” “SYNCHRO,” and “Virtuosity,” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in several jurisdictions outside the U.S.
Our Production and Suppliers
Our principal supplier of cloud services is Microsoft, with whom we have entered into a multi-year contract for a committed level of expenditures for Azure. We are in negotiations with additional cloud services providers to expand our delivery capabilities and optimize costs.
Environmental, Social, and Governance
In 2023, we continued to build upon our strong commitment to sustainability with an emphasis on goal setting aligned with leading standards and continually improving our reporting. In the third year of our formal Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) strategy, we continued our regular engagement with stakeholders to solicit feedback on our ESG report. Included in our report were the results of our first materiality assessment, key objectives related to our priority topics, and new disclosure areas aligned with leading reporting frameworks and standards. We have enhanced our disclosures and reporting, including better defining our handprint (i.e., our users’ positive impacts empowered by using Bentley software) and sharing progress on key goals. Regarding our handprint, the United Nations’ SDGs focus on sustainable outcomes, providing a framework and inspiration for business policies and purpose. Combining the concepts of ESG and SDGs, we focus on “ES(D)G,” empowering sustainable development goals, by helping our users realize outcomes that are more sustainable, predictable, and resilient.
We look forward to sharing updates for our full year 2023 performance in our next ESG report, scheduled to be published in the second quarter of 2024. To learn more, visit our ESG website at https://www.bentley.com/company/esg-overview/. The information posted on this website is not incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10‑K.
Human Capital Management
Our colleagues are a key success factor in driving our continued growth. Our talent strategy focuses on creating an enriching colleague experience through an inclusive and engaging culture in which colleagues can develop their career while making a positive impact by advancing the world’s infrastructure.
As of December 31, 2023, we had approximately 5,200 full‑time colleagues globally, including approximately 2,000 in the Americas (the U.S., Canada, and Latin America, including the Caribbean); approximately 1,500 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (“EMEA”); and approximately 1,700 in Asia‑Pacific (“APAC”). None of our full‑time U.S. colleagues are unionized. Outside the U.S., a small overall portion of our colleagues in certain countries are represented by a colleague representative organization, such as a union or colleague association. Our colleagues bring 66 languages to fulfill the needs of our globally dispersed accounts and users. Our colleagues are highly qualified with an average of seven years of total service and advanced academic credentials, including nearly 130 doctoral degrees and over 1,300 master’s‑level degrees.
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Colleague Experience
We take a colleague‑centric approach in all that we do. We achieve a strong sense of belonging through focused efforts to build trust and enhance personal and organizational experiences. We encourage meaningful and continuous feedback through annual performance reviews, quarterly alignment sessions, and engagement surveys, helping encourage colleagues to feel engaged and ensuring they have the resources they need to perform the best and most rewarding work of their career.
A key differentiator in creating a positive experience for our colleagues is our Infrastructure Empowered Workforce Plan (“IEWP”). IEWP is a global strategy that empowers colleagues to take advantage of our physical offices for necessary in-person collaboration, while institutionalizing the flexibility to work remotely otherwise, fully enabled by technology. IEWP allows our colleagues to make the best of remote and in‑office work to perform at a higher level and enhances team and business productivity.
Talent Acquisition
We believe our Company’s purpose, mission, and values, as well as our culture, including an intentional commitment to flexible work through IEWP, are drivers for attracting and retaining colleagues. Our talent acquisition strategy leverages best practices to attract, engage, and hire top talent. We enjoy high levels of colleague referrals to supplement our corporate hiring practices, and nurture relationships with universities around the world to hire talented graduates into rotational assignments, all of which provides a strong talent pipeline.
Professional Development
With enhanced capacity to collaborate virtually, colleagues can grow their careers no matter where they are located. We empower colleagues with learning and development resources to support their continuous growth as individual contributors, team managers, or organization leaders. We offer live classroom learning, curated learning pathways, and open access to a powerful learning platform. We also focus on developing the personal and professional skills of our leaders. Our Leadership Excellence and Development (LEAD) Essentials program strives to equip leaders to guide their teams while leveraging Bentley core competencies and a “One Bentley” mindset.
Inclusion and Belonging
We are a global company with colleagues of different cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives based in more than 40 countries worldwide. We strive to build a culture where all colleagues feel a sense of belonging so that they can fully realize their potential and produce their best work. We have developed programs in the workplace and continue to invest in diversity partnerships so that our colleagues and communities can thrive.
Our Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Alliance (“IDEA”) provides a platform for colleagues from all regions, departments, levels, and demographics to build community. IDEA currently has six focus groups: OpenPride, OpenAbilities, People of Color in the U.S., Women at Bentley, Veterans at Bentley, and IDEA India. Each IDEA focus group is sponsored by a member of our leadership team. We have held interactive sessions with our executives, emerging leaders, and talent acquisition teams in fostering inclusion and belonging and eliminating unconscious bias, and have implemented training for hiring managers to ensure fairness in the interview process.
Additional information on our diversity, equity, and inclusion programs can be found on our website at www.bentley.com/en/about-us/diversity-equity-inclusion.
Corporate Information
Bentley Systems, Incorporated was incorporated in Delaware in 1987 and is headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania.
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Website Access to Reports
Our internet address is www.bentley.com. The information posted on our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10‑K. Our Annual Report on Form 10‑K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10‑Q, Current Reports on Form 8‑K and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available free of charge on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and on the Investor Relations portion of our website at www.bentley.com (or investors.bentley.com) as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.
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