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Pointools, the steroids of Bentley Descartes

Descartes is the Bentley product equivalent (in part) to what Raster Design does from AutoDesk. Usually the greatest utility that has been promoted so far is image processing, although it has much more to offer I remember barely speaking a couple of times about creating Vector data from scanned drawings And also on the Fusion of images With clipping polygons.

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But Bentley wants to take this software further on a very cutting-edge topic: point clouds, an issue they have been insisting on for the last year, to the point that at the last conference in Amsterdam they used the metaphorical phrase “Steroids for Bentley Descartes” .

Let's look at two strategies that seem to be notable in that effort for digital twins and their Return to talent.

 

The purchase of Pointools Ltd

This is a company that developed one of the most innovative products in point cloud management. Despite being a young tool, it grew surprisingly thanks to its openness to work with the big manufacturers of equipment and software simultaneously.

Half of its growth was achieved with Pointools Suite, a very attractive tool for data management with surprising agility, an essential requirement in these files where there are not thousands of data but millions. The basic functionalities became quite attractive, in matters such as filtering of unnecessary obstacles, intelligent filtering with recoloring and high quality animation.

Bentley discards

The rest was achieved with Vortex which includes an API on which not only Bentley but AutoDesk, Rhino, Sketchup, also Trimble, Leica, Topcon among others were integrated. Perhaps the most attractive thing was the interoperability sought, which, added to the compactness of the files and the rich content, made it very attractive.

Bentley discards

The pursuit of human talent

But there is much more than a great tool for Bentley to think about this matter. The two geniuses behind Pointools were strategically followed, one of them Joe Croser, who was Bentley's Director of International Marketing between 2005 and 2010, when it went from being a 300 million to 500 million company.

Croser left Bentley and between 2010 to 2011 as Vice President of Pointools he developed a growth and market penetration strategy that increased sales by 90% and raised the value of the product by 50% until he finished in his masterful act with the purchase of the company by Bentley Systems in 2011. Now Croser has his own company: Oundle Group, where he took Larry Reagan, another former Bentley and they are dedicated to what they surely know how to do: help companies grow.

The other character behind the growth of Pointools was Faraz Ravi, co-founder and CEO for almost 10 years after the purchase became the Director of products within Bentley Systems.

While Bentley did not continue with Joe Croser Bentley, intuition tells us that he continued to recognize his ability. He accepted the alliance to work together for Bentley to integrate the Vortex API and eventually bought the complete product including the company. This is called recognizing that a talent is out of our reach but not its product.

In the case of Faraz Ravi, just a few days ago he was integrated as Chairman of the International Committee for 3D Imaging Systems known as ASTM, where the standards for this subject are produced. Placing that piece in that place will make most of the interoperability efforts that were achieved with Pointools adopted in the standards of this line that by the way has irreversible potential and a gradual integration with remote sensing.


 

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3DTextureforBuildingsSo with the Select Series 3 we now have a Descartes that beyond raster data processing integrates the creation, editing, theming and modeling of point clouds.

  • With Microstation work logic. For example you can select two point axes, using a fence that filters obstacles, then warp a surface of a 3D face of an object, and then stretch if necessary to extend to an already existing face part that it has an irregular shape. Then make a right button to turn it into a reusable texture.
  • With the efficiency of the V8i platform that allows rendering data management with enough efficiency for a long time, reason that has led to high fidelity in large companies in engineering and architecture where Bentley is quite well positioned.
  • With the incorporation of the functionalities of Pointools that will stop being called thus to be the steroids of Descartes.

We will see how they manage to position themselves beyond the developed countries where the modeling of intelligent cities is a wave of interest, but which in our countries is slowed down by priority in more basic issues of the geospatial field and where many efforts are lost for our weak Administrative careers and little vision of the officials in decisive positions.

Learn more about Bentley Descartes.

Golgi Alvarez

Writer, researcher, specialist in Land Management Models. He has participated in the conceptualization and implementation of models such as: National Property Administration System SINAP in Honduras, Management Model of Joint Municipalities in Honduras, Integrated Cadastre-Registry Management Model in Nicaragua, Territory Administration System SAT in Colombia . Editor of the Geofumadas knowledge blog since 2007 and creator of the AulaGEO Academy that includes more than 100 courses on GIS - CAD - BIM - Digital Twins topics.

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