In this episode of Bentley Talks, Andy Rahden, Vice President of Solutions Engineering & Services, explains how the Bentley Tech Summit brings together solution engineering, services, support teams, and customers to better serve infrastructure users worldwide.
Recorded in Berlin, the conversation explores why the city is a fitting backdrop amid major infrastructure investment, how the summit has evolved from product training to industry-focused workflows, and why face-to-face collaboration is essential to solving complex infrastructure challenges.
Rahden also shares his long-term vision: building a global community of technologists—inside and outside Bentley—who learn from one another, share best practices, and help shape how infrastructure is designed, built, and experienced.
Below is the transcript of the conversation.
Tomas Kellner: What is the Bentley Tech Summit?
Andy Rahden: We’re so excited. This is our second Bentley Tech Summit that we’ve held. We initiated the first Bentley Tech Summit in 2024, in December. Exactly a year later, we’re here in Berlin, and we’re so excited to bring all of our internal colleagues together, our solution engineering, our services teams, and our support teams to really increase their ability to provide the needs of our accounts and our users every single day.
TK: Why are you hosting this summit in Berlin?
Andy: You know, there are amazing investments in infrastructure, specifically in the amount of half $1 trillion dollars going into the German industry itself. That’s super exciting for Germany. But what’s even more exciting is what that means for the people of Germany to facilitate the demand and the needs of utilizing that money to be impactful in the infrastructure sector. It’s going to require a lot of companies and a lot of individuals to utilize technology to be able to develop those solutions for the communities moving forward in relation to infrastructure.
That’s where Bentley comes into play, as we’re providing software for that market, and it’s an exciting thing to be a part of. What we do every single day, from a technology and a software perspective, directly equates to the designs of future infrastructure and the construction of future infrastructure, which in the end, is what people experience when they wake up every morning and drive down the street or walk down the walkway or whatever it is that they’re doing in relation to the use of infrastructure. And that’s exciting because it improves people’s lives long term.
TK: How is this tech summit different from the first one?
Andy: In the first, the first summit last year, we were really focused on improving people’s knowledge around how our products worked and functioned so that they could better facilitate the needs of our accounts, users, and customers. As we progress into this year, we’re really focused on real industry workflows that our accounts are utilizing so that we can solve bigger problems and bigger challenges that they’re dealing with every single day.
The other thing that we’re incorporating this year that we didn’t have last year was we have our first customers attending here as well. And our customers are not only attending the event, but they’re also actually providing enablement to our internal colleagues. And so this starts to build more of a community, because people can share best practices about how they’re utilizing Bentley technology. That’s super exciting because when you bring different users in and have them show each other how they’re utilizing the technology, you really start to build a community of technologists. And that’s exciting because there’s a lot of power behind that. There’s a lot of progress in infrastructure that can happen as a result.
TK: The next tech summit is in early 2027. What is your vision for it?
Andy: It’s really to build a community of technologists. We see by bringing together people who understand and are passionate about Bentley technology coming together in one location. The event is the event, but the community of practice and getting to know who’s working within the industry and knowing who the best people are, the best technologists that are utilizing that software that you can learn from is something special to be a part of, because those individuals who are passionate about it influence other individuals who become passionate about it, who influence other individuals who actually go do work in the field and are progressive with the technology that’s being used. We really want to create a community of technologists as we move forward.
