Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a global provider of software and digital twins services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure, announced the acquisition of Keynetix, a UK-headquartered provider of cloud-based software for capturing, visualising, modeling, and sharing of geotechnical data.
“Today’s announcement provides our team, customers, and partners with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance digital engineering in the geotechnical industry,” said Roger Chandler, managing director of Keynetix. “At Keynetix, our mission has always been to make geotechnical data more broadly accessible and valuable. Today’s announcement will truly open up geotechnical data collaboration across Bentley, Autodesk, and other platforms.”
The addition of Keynetix software expands Bentley’s geotechnical offerings and accelerates Bentley’s vision of enabling subsurface digital twins for infrastructure projects and assets.
“Infrastructure professionals know that the geologic, hydrologic, chemical and engineering properties of a potential project site, and the infrastructure assets buried beneath the soil, roads, and other structures represent some of the greatest risks to infrastructure project safety, budgets, and schedules,” said Bob Mankowski, vice president and business unit executive of digital cities for Bentley Systems. “Having a subsurface digital twin – a 3D representation of the subsurface coupled with models to analyze and simulate behavior – will be immensely valuable in all phases of the asset lifecycle.”
Subsurface digital twins can be vital for assessing and managing risks in infrastructure projects, and to the planning, design, construction and operations of infrastructure assets. The creation and curation of subsurface digital twins involves modeling the underground environment (geology, hydrology, chemistry, and engineering properties, and the underground infrastructure), and utility networks, structures, and tunnels – and then analysing and simulating the subsurface behavior. Supplementing borehole reports managed by Bentley’s gINT software, Keynetix’s cloud-based geotechnical knowledge management system captures and manages underground environment information for Bentley’s geotechnical analysis applications, PLAXIS and SoilVision.
“Bentley’s gINT and Keynetix’s HoleBASE software platforms are core, business critical tools within our ground investigation (GI) businesses, and have been so for more than 20 years,” said Mark Bevan, associate director of ground investigation data systems for UK-based Structural Soils. “The acquisition of Keynetix’s modern and innovative software into the Bentley portfolio, alongside the mature and proven gINT platform, is a breath-taking and exciting landmark moment within the GI digital landscape.”
“My colleagues and I welcome our new teammates from Keynetix, led by principals Roger Chandler, Gary Morin, and Carl Grice, who for many years have envisioned the potential and necessity of geotechnical and geoenvironmental data management to enable better designs and more successful projects,” said Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems. “The geotechnical and infrastructure professions will benefit from their continued and expanded leadership, now within Bentley Systems!”
