This December, the crowds at Berlinās Christmas markets will be admiring more than the festive stalls and delicious GlĆ¼hwein. With over 500 infrastructure professionals in town for the Bentley Tech Summit 2025 (BTS25), the cityās bridges, stations, tunnels, and trams are about to get a fresh wave of appreciation.
Over three days, Bentley Systems is hosting BTS25 as a hands-on, technical learning summit, where Bentley colleagues will gain greater experience into how the companyās tools connect to support infrastructure projects and how engineers apply the software in the field.āÆ
The event brings together product managers, solution engineers, services teams, technical support specialists, and a select group of industry power users who work with Bentley tools every dayāand know exactly where the workflows excel and where there are opportunities to evolve. The aim is simple: accelerate how Bentley, a global infrastructure engineering software company, learns from itself and its customers.Ā
Bentleyās Andy Rahden serves as the event host. As the companyās vice president of solution engineering and services, Rahden sets the tone for three days of deep technical learning and cross-team collaboration, positioning BTS25 as a key step in how Bentley prepares its people and solutions for the future. āBTS25 is a place to create an ecosystem of knowledge that we can build on to improve global infrastructure,ā he says.
Building a new kind of learning ecosystem
The pressures on global infrastructure are increasing amid more demand, too few skilled people, tighter schedules, and rising expectations. āThe job of one person tomorrow needs to be what three people would once have done,ā Rahden says. Ā
Attendees will follow deep, two-day industry learning tracks built around real-world workflows for transportation, water, energy, cities, and geotechnical engineering. While BTS25 will feature Bentley product workshops and deep dives, the main focus is on something bigger: How Bentley tools work together across an entire project or the life of an entire infrastructure assetāfrom design to operations and management.Ā
Kierstin Arthur, senior technical enablement manager for Bentley, designed the curriculum and sees BTS25 as a turning point. āShowing our products working together end to end, and linking that to real industry solutions, is something weāve never attempted before at this scale,ā she says. Her aim is to pull back the curtains on product silos and give Bentley colleagues a fuller picture. āIt is a wonderful learning opportunity,ā she says.Ā
Arthurās team designed learning paths around what users do with the software in real-world situations, not the capabilities of individual tools. āOur colleagues know the products well, but we want them to see how they fit together across projects.ā
Opening the door to users
This is the second annual Bentley Tech Summit. But this year, the event much bigger than the inaugural gathering and, for the first time, a select group of industry users have been invited to join the teaching team. Their role will be to show their own digital workflows in action, highlighting their unique infrastructure challenges and the ways Bentley tools help address them.āÆāÆĀ
One of this yearās invited instructors is Ross Brown, technical director with Beca, an engineering and consulting firm in New Zealand, and an accredited Bentley OpenRoads Premier Scholar. Brown and his team won Bentleyās Going Digital Award for Roads and Highways at the 2022 Year in Infrastructure event for the Takitimu North Link highway project, which stitched together a wide range of Bentley tools into a single connected workflow.āÆāIt was a pleasure to be invited by Bentley so that we can showcase what we are doing in this part of the world and also learn something about what other engineers are doing in their part of the world,ā Brown says.āÆĀ
Brownās session at BTS25 focuses on integrated design review and the practical realities of moving entire project teams and owners into live, federated digital models. He has spent years pushing for this shift inside Beca and across industry. āWeāve just got to educate people across the whole project team to say, āHey, this is where the industry is going,ā whether theyāre our own engineers or the clients we deliver projects for.āāÆĀ
For Brown, the move away from PDFs and fragmented tools is not just a technical upgrade but a generational one. Younger engineers are already expecting richer digital workflows, and project investorsĀ andĀ ownersĀ areĀ beginning to see the benefits.Ā
Brown is also candid about what still needs to improve: passing data between some Bentley products, which sometimes requires manual work. āI call it software gymnastics,ā he says. āWe do it quite well. But come on, it is a Bentley productāit should be automated.ā Brownās view is that users see real-world workflow bottlenecks that software developers can miss, and that events such as BTS25 will allow industry feedback to hit at the right level.Ā
Building bridges
Another external expert joining BTS25 is Barritt Lovelace, vice president of unmanned aerial systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and reality modeling at Collins Engineers in Minneapolis. Lovelace has inspected upward of 3,000 bridges and helped build and turn digital twins into a practical everyday tool for asset owners. His team uses drones along with Bentleyās iTwin Capture and iTwin Experience for inspection, rehabilitation planning, and load rating, with AI accelerating defect detection.Ā
Lovelace is enthusiastic about coming to Berlin and getting new insights. āEvery time we have a meeting with Bentley, I learn something new that I wish I had known all along,ā he says. āI feel like we are on the cutting edge, but we are still discovering new capabilities.āĀ
What matters to him is not only the tools but the partnership behind them. āA lot of software companies get excited about an idea but then it dies,ā he says. āBut our relationship with Bentley is different. They have adapted software based on our feedback before, and that ability to influence the tools really matters to my company.āāÆĀ
It is this kind of long-term industry collaboration that Bentley wants to amplify at BTS25, to help co-create the next wave of infrastructure innovation.Ā
The beginning of something much bigger
Bentleyās Rahden sees the user component of BTS25 as the start of a wider shift. āIn future summits, we want even more of our customers to run training and engagement sessions.ā He expects the event to grow sharply over the next few years, in person and online, as it evolves into a global learning ecosystem shared by Bentley and its customers.Ā
This year, the focus is on building connective tissue across Bentley products and teams, and clearly signaling the companyās direction. Rahden says the investment to create an event of this scale will be justified by the outcome. āThe real power in the infrastructure space comes when the physical and digital meet,ā he says. āWe are expecting tremendous behavior change.ā For him, BTS25 marks a pivot that will give people inside and outside Bentley the right context to work in a more connected way, long after the mulled wine and gingerbread are gone.Ā
