In mid-September, out of the blue, Bentley Systems announced it had acquired Cesium, an industry cherished 3D geospatial platform with an ecosystem of open standards, including Cesium.JS and 3D Tile technology. Martyn Day talked with Patrick Cozzi, previously of Cesium, and Julien Moutte, Bentley Systems CTO, to learn more about the deal that promises to bring the worlds of digital twins and geospatial closer together
It’s rare that a piece of industry news arrives in my inbox and prompts me to do a double-take. But that’s exactly what happened on 6 September, with the news that Bentley Systems had acquired Cesium.
Bentley Systems is the infrastructure giant in the AECO space and is currently undergoing a changing of the guard as the brothers who founded the company take a step back and get a new executive team installed.
That can be a distracting process for any organisation. However, new Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins has made the choice to forge ahead with an industry significant acquisition, probably the most impactful since Google sold SketchUp to Trimble.
Because Bentley has always strongly focused on infrastructure, geospatial has played an important part in the data frameworks that its solutions provide. Decades ago, the company was the first CAD software firm to integrate a world-based coordinate system in its file format, because big infrastructure projects are always located somewhere and can span thousands of kilometres.
Bentley has had agreements with Esri, in addition to offering its own mapping and cadastre-driven tools. However, for the last few years, it has obsessively developed and also acquired technologies relating to 4D construction, reality capture, digital twin and asset management.
Bentley Systems is not the only AEC-focused software firm to understand the importance of geospatial. When Andrew Anagnost took the CEO job at Autodesk in 2017, he didn’t waste time in forging a partnership with ESRI and starting to back-fill the company’s BIM and civils products with GIS integration. Autodesk also actively chased Bentley Systems’ Department of Transport clients and acquired Innovyze in 2021 to expand into water treatment, another Bentley dominated market. For over five years, Esri and Autodesk have been developing hooks between their products, enabling the movement of BIM and GIS within their ecosystems.
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Enter Cesium
So where does Cesium fit into all this? For many reasons, the company hasn’t previously seemed like an acquisition option. In much the same vein as Robert McNeel and Rhino, Cesium built a business based on community and established a huge network of around one million users, as well as about 10,000 developers, with powerful yet relatively low-cost GIS integration/distribution tools.
Cesium has a deep belief in the open source approach to software, putting a lot of effort into the development of Cesium. JS and its streamable, interactive 3D Tile open format, which supports vector, 4D, 2D, 3D, point clouds and photogrammetry. This is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and has been used to map subsurface, surface, airborne and space environments.
Cesium’s formats have been embraced by the likes of Google and NASA. Its data structures, meanwhile, also support other open formats, such as glTF for model info (asset information), as well as the latest advances in GPU acceleration. While the technology is a perfect fit for Bentley’s digital twin strategy, the culture fit was, on the face of it, incongruous to corporate customers.
Around the time of the 2020 Open Letter to Autodesk, I had a conversation with Keith Bentley, then Bentley Systems CTO, in which we discussed whether open source applications such as Blender BIM were the way to go. From that chat, I was left in little doubt that this was not Keith Bentley’s mindset, since he was strongly of the belief that programmers’ efforts should be rewarded.
However, he was more inclined to agree that open source data was perhaps a way forward, because for customers, the keys to data must remain in their hands. The whole premise of digital twins requires the assembling of data from all sorts of applications, in many file formats. In that respect, data trapped in proprietary silos is likely to be an industry-wide problem. In 2021, Bentley opened the iTwin.js library with source code hosted on GitHub and distributed under the MIT licence. Since then, Bentley has been seeking wider adoption of its iTwin data wrapper.
So, while I was pondering Cesium’s culture fit, I hadn’t considered Bentley’s cultural change. Its newfound belief in open data isn’t just a passing fad. It really is something that the company intends to deliver on.
When considered from that angle, acquiring Cesium takes Bentley closer to its goal of having open format technology that covers all the many different sources of data necessary to build an infrastructure digital twin. That could be scan / photogrammetry data, BIM data, GIS data, asset tagging and management data.
Of course, Cesium offers far more besides. Its super-fast 3D pipeline enables huge datasets to be visualised locally in Unreal Engine, on the web, on a mobile and in real time. The Cesium ecosystem also includes developers who may want to utilise Bentley’s wide array of SaaS analytical and simulation tools or BIM capabilities, and existing customers will be able to view their digital twins in geospatial context for analysis and service planning.
In conversation
In conversation with Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi, he outlined for me his view of the deal. “Cesium is an open-source project doing massive scale 3D geospatial, open source, open standards, large models with semantics on the web. When Bentley found Cesium eight or nine years ago, they opened up our eyes. They said, ‘Hey, Patrick, this is more than geospatial. This can do the built environment. This can do infrastructure,” he said.
He continued: “When we brought 3D Tiles to OGC (The Open Geospatial Consortium) to make an OGC community standard, Bentley was part of that original submission team. This is going back to 2017. Bentley had ContextCapture, now called iTwin Capture, which was some of the first photogrammetry ever put into Cesium. We have had a long relationship with Bentley. We’ve known the Bentley brothers, the leadership team of today, and we think we share a lot of the same DNA. We like Bentley’s interest and commitment and authenticity around open source, open standards, and building a platform which uplifts the ecosystem. We know that that is Bentley’s belief and it’s where Bentley wants to take the future.”
We are transitioning from files to a data centric world, and customers need to have confidence and trust in how the data is going to be handled. We believe in a true open approach, which is based on open standards, open source and open APIs Julien Moutte, Bentley Systems CTO
A few days prior to announcing the acquisition, Cesium published a press release regarding its BIM integration technology preview. At that time, AEC Magazine reached out to the company, but they couldn’t answer, because they were busy finalising the deal. Cozzi added, “As you saw just before the agreement, we are doing more in AEC.’” I suspect that Bentley has a raft of technology to assist in that.
Bentley CTO Julien Moutte then gave me the Bentley perspective, “We are transitioning from files to a data centric world, and customers need to have confidence and trust in how the data is going to be handled. We believe in a true open approach, which is based on open standards, open source and open APIs,” he said.
“The iTwin technology stack is going to continue using more and more open standards. We are looking at creating and enriching the standard ecosystem with some new capabilities around BIM collaboration. We have discussed the limitations we’ve seen in IFC, for instance, and we’ve created BI-model technology, and I think one thing we captured in the room at NXT BLD is that not many know about (Bentley) iModels,” he continued.
“We need to learn how to be better in creating an ecosystem, a community. And I think that’s one of the things that Patrick and his team are going to bring to us. We want to create a thriving developer ecosystem on top of this platform, which is built around open data.”
Cesium has about 60 employees based in Philadelphia. They are mainly programmers, with about 10 people in sales – but sales are mainly inbound and focused on products such as its Cesium Ion SaaS 3D geospatial data hubs, together with large partnerships and hosting. The Cesium offices are located not too far from the Bentley Exton Headquarters. By joining forces with Bentley, Cozzi said that it will allow the company to achieve more industry impact.
Moutte also explained what he thinks Cesium brings to Bentley tech stack. “There are multiple facets here. Obviously, I believe that our users, the engineers of the world, would benefit greatly in having more context when they do their work, and we believe that the best way to provide this to them is by leveraging the Cesium technology.
“Today, we’re trying to do this with the iTwin platform, but I think there is a better way to do this when it comes to geospatial data, bringing in Google 3D Tiles, making sure that we can combine and bring all of that data in an environment in an aligned way, using the geospatial coordinates. Whether it’s underground, buildings or engineering models, it’s about more value to our users,” he said.
He concluded: “The huge Cesium ecosystem is consuming Cesium geospatial data. If they are bringing building models in, they don’t have the full detail of what those building models contain. It’s mostly geometry. There’s a lot of value we could deliver by providing access to the metadata of those building models. We have capabilities to bring in geospatial analysis, lots of simulation, whether it’s flooding, mobility, structures and visualising all of this in the context of geospatial is also very valuable. It’s a massive opportunity.”
Cozzi added, “BIM could learn a lot from these large GIS models. 3D Tiles doesn’t just stream the geometry and metadata for terrain and photogrammetry, but can also do that for the built environment. Up to this point, a lot of that has been done in OBJ files or FBX, which are standard graphics files. We thought we could help them more, so have built some new pipelines to preserve more of that semantic data, especially the hierarchical nature.”
So, for example, Cesium built a pipeline for IFC, and also into Revit, he explains. “Then we run our super-smart algorithms on the geometry and metadata, and frankly, the metadata might actually be heavier than the geometry. Then, in a domain-specific way, we slice and dice that into 3D Tiles, so that it’s streamed very effectively over the web, placed within a geospatial context,” he said.
“So where do we go next? Bentley brings a ton of domain knowledge about infrastructure and AEC, and we keep saying ‘better together’.”
Conclusion
Cozzi will now head up the iTwin platform developed within Bentley. While the technology benefit has been clearly explained, it also seems that Bentley hopes to preserve and learn from the open-source culture that Cesium has embodied, with its dedication to openness, performance and solving problems for thousands of users in many different industries.
While I still have my doubts about the potential size of market for digital twins within the building sector – insofar as there are so many buildings but the cost of making a twin is high – when you scale up the geo level and start talking about managing assets like roads, rail, national grids and power stations, then digital twins and asset management start to make a lot more sense.
The acquisition of Cesium is a major coup for Bentley, which will not only help it in its historic markets, but also introduce it (literally) to a whole new digital world
