Page 25 - BENTLEY SYSTEMS PR REPORT - MARCH 2024

In the US, a big organization will not buy from a tiny company. They can't be bothered
to. But in the UK, the small companies succeed. For example, Synchro, which was a
cadre of a few people, could become the 4D modeling supplier for Crossrail, a £25
billion project. In the UK, enterprises have a greater receptivity to risk and reward trade-
offs and are willing to give small companies a chance. And the result is thirteen
companies that have gotten big enough one way or another to come to our attention
and be acquired, representing now the bulk of the 450 people we have in the UK today.

Merchant engineers

Early in his career, Bentley was attracted to the UK owing to the greater receptivity of
large firms to try out new things. Additionally, much of his success was inspired by a
thriving ‘engineering merchant’ industry in which UK engineering firms grew by
cultivating new talent as they expanded into new markets worldwide. These teams were
tasked with building infrastructure that helped create the physical foundation for the
UK’s global empire. He cited the example of Mott Macdonald, whose predecessors
were building railroads and water systems across the world since 1888:

What they invested as merchant engineers was not capital necessarily; it was their
talent that led the way to infrastructure advancement in the world, which still results in
British standards everywhere, even beyond the Commonwealth.”

Over the years, Bentley Systems has made over a hundred acquisitions as it expanded
its portfolio to take advantage of new engineering technologies. I asked him how this
idea inspired the company's growth. With each acquisition, they have invited the team
onboard as well as tools, and the vast majority of its UK team came from the thirteen
acquisitions here.

A defining characteristic of weaving the new technologies and teams into Bentley
Systems is that four of the five founders were software engineers. He said:

The fact that our technical decisions have been made by the Bentleys has caused us to
really insist on a platform approach. We try to write code only once and use it many
times. And that has enabled them to build an ecosystem that takes advantage of our
platform. They don't have to start from scratch if they want to do something specific to a
discipline. They can build on our platform. So, most of these one-hundred acquisitions
that we've done are among this ecosystem who have started with our platform. They
had something in common to start with, so the integration was not as burdensome as it
would otherwise be if it were a hundred random acquisitions.

Cultivating talent

The string of acquisitions also helped Bentley build out its talent pipeline:

https://diginomica.com/legacy-built-40-years-trust-learnings-greg-bentley-he-steps-down-ceo-
bentley-systems