Guests listening to a presentation during the conference in Doha.
By Isabel Ovalle
DOHA: Bentley Systems Inc, the global leader in engineering software solutions for railways, will open an office in Qatar in 2013 aiming to support their clients in the country. Bentley’s users include engineering firms participating in the bid for Qatar Rail’s projects.
The company, founded in 1984, has over 3,000 employees in 50 countries, and will soon have branches in Doha and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia).
Ted Lamboo, Senior Vice-President of Geospatial, Transportation and Local Infrastructure at Bentley, participated in an event organised by the company in Doha this week.
Lamboo told The Peninsula that Bentley serves “many global engineering firms that go where the projects are, and we try to follow our users to support them.”
This company provides software solutions for sustainable infrastructure around the world and “tries to be as local as possible,” added its vice-president.
“We hope to open an office in 2013 in Qatar, because it’s where a lot of the big infrastructure projects are happening right now,” he said.
“Bentley is interested in many of the projects that are happening in Doha and Qatar Rail is one of them,” said Lamboo.
The company will have a few people leading the office in Doha and bring more staff when it’s needed.
“We are a solution provider that can deliver the services when the user needs them, but services are not an objective by itself for Bentley,” added Lamboo.
On the subject of their participation in Qatar Rail’s projects, the VP of Bentley said, “we’re ready and we can take on the rail project any day. As far as we are concerned, the train can leave the station any minute.”
Even though Qatar Rail’s developments are not imminent, during the conference organised in Doha, Bentley shared its expertise in similar projects, like Cross Rail, in England, that covered a distance of 90km, with a budget of $24bn.
At the top of this project are 3,000 engineers and thousands of documents of different types. When this project is finished the information model of the rail will be handed out to the owner. “If the information is managed well during the process, the rail operator will benefit of all the data that has been collected,” explained Lamboo.
Bentley hopes to set an open data standard in Qatar and is already helping in the development of the Qatar Building Information Modelling (QBIM). On this issue, Alan Lamont, Vice-President of Building International at Bentley, added that “we are proud to be part of it, we have been invited to give advice and I hope they create a neutral standard.”
The Peninsula
