Industrial giant Siemens and engineering software company Bentley Systems announced a strategic alliance that could be the next step in the company going public.
Privately owned Bentley, based in Exton, PA, was launched by family from Delaware, four of whom hold top executive positions.
Siemens and Bentley Systems will initially invest at least $54 million in developing joint solutions as more and more design work moves to the digital space.
This work will leverage design and engineering software that can be accessed from the cloud, rather than being accessed from systems installed on individual servers or computers.
Also about $76 million secondary shares of Bentley’s common stock have been acquired by Siemens, under a company program that will continue until Bentley Systems’ stock is publicly traded.
Siemens and Bentley Systems have Ben licensing each other’s technology in software offerings.
For example, Bentley’s reality modeling software has been integrated into Siemens Process Simulate in modeling brownfield industrial environments.
The new investment initiatives will involve virtually all Siemens divisions, which make everything from medical equipment to electrical generators and high-speed trains.
Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley said, “Only with Siemens could we so purposefully advance beyond merely linking the ‘Industrial Internet of Things’ to ultimately leverage digital engineering models for visual operations and connected infrastructure asset performance. Given our long history of sharing complementary technologies, we are very excited to now contribute so broadly to Siemens’ industrial digitalization leadership.”
Siemens has annual sales of $82 billion 348,000 employees worldwide.
Founded in 1984, Bentley has more than 3,000 employees in more than 50 countries and more than $600 million in annual revenues.
Over the years, it has made many acquisitions and pioneered the use of software as a service that allows continual upgrades for a yearly fee.
