In this Bentley Talks episode, Chief Storyteller Tomas Kellner meets Bentley Systems CTO Julien Moutte at the Bentley Tech Summit 2025 in Berlin to explore the vision shaping the future of infrastructure engineering.
Moutte explains why the summit is the perfect place to share Bentley’s long-term vision — starting with a uniquely broad and deep portfolio of engineering applications. He discusses how connecting data across disciplines unlocks new levels of productivity and why openness—open data, open standards, open APIs, open ecosystems—is essential for infrastructure that must last for decades.
Moutte also discusses the role of Cesium, from powering infrastructure digital twins to enabling developers to build new applications. He shares what he’s seeing at the summit and why he believes these innovations will elevate how users design, build, and operate infrastructure at scale.
Below is the transcript of the conversation.
Tomas Kellner: Why did you come to Berlin to share your vision for the future with colleagues at the Bentley Tech Summit?
Julien Moutte: Well, the vision is first and foremost for our users, right? The best way to convince our users about the power of our vision is to convince those people who are going to talk to them and relay that vision to them. I think one of the first pillars of our vision, which was created by our founders, is to have a unique portfolio of products and engineering capabilities that is both broad and deep. The different industries and disciplines that we serve. I think this is unprecedented. And that portfolio of applications, having them working as one, exchanging data back and forth. Sharing insights is also something that is going to unlock a new level of productivity and efficiency in the way we design infrastructure.
TK: How does Cesium fit into your vision for Bentley’s future?
JM: Cesium for us is a very powerful technological foundation because it allows you to bring all of those data points, the ones that you produce with our engineering applications, but also the ones you collect from the field or from people who are collaborating on the project. It allows us to bring all of those data points together and to align them around something that we all understand, which is positioned in space and in time. Being able to bring all of that data to our users with that kind of digital twin of the world, your own digital twin of the world, which Cesium is making possible, is a very powerful way to make that information available to our users. For us, this is a very good enablement layer.
But, there’s more to Cesium. Cesium is also a very powerful platform for application developers, and we don’t believe that the breadth of our portfolio is sufficient to be able to really achieve the purpose of the company, to advance infrastructure. We want to also benefit from that existing community and empower them with the engineering tools that we have our capabilities so that they can develop those powerful applications as well.
TK: Why is openness important?
JM: As I’ve mentioned before, we want to convince our users about our vision, and we believe that we are getting to the point where everybody sees the value of bringing the data together, having applications exchange and interpret fluently. But the next big thing that people are going to realize is that you don’t want to get that data trapped somewhere where you don’t have control over it, because an infrastructure asset is going to live for decades. And the data that you’ve aggregated and curated over the years, you want to be able to continue leveraging that data. Ten, fifteen, 100 years from now, how do you do this if you don’t use open standards? How do you do this if you don’t have open source and open APIs? And I believe this is a key aspect of our strategy, this open approach to things, which is allowing us to take the next step.
TK: You’ve attended several sessions here at the Bentley Tech Summit. What are you hearing that’s inspiring you?
JM: Well, first, we’ve been busy. There are a lot of new product advancements that are being socialized now with our teams. It’s super rewarding for me to see this technology getting into the hands of our colleagues so that they can then help our users with those advancements. There’s some super exciting stuff that was introduced for some of our historic technologies, like ProjectWise, but also the new applications we’re creating.
Seeing how those technologies are being featured and the knowledge being transferred to our colleagues is really exciting. I think we’re going to see the results of that as we see our users starting to really leverage the technology with the scale that this team here is going to be able to bring to the market.
