Bentley Systems has announced its acquisition of 3D geospatial firm, Cesium, a company that develops open platforms for producing 3D geospatial applications.
Cesium’s 3D Tiles open standard has been adopted by enterprises, governments and tens of thousands of application developers globally, while the company says its ‘ion’ SaaS platform is used by more than one million active devices every month.
According to Bentley, the combination of its iTwin digital twin platform plus Cesium’s capabilities will enables developers to seamlessly align 3D geospatial data with engineering, subsurface, IoT, reality, and enterprise data to create more-realistic digital twins.
The company particularly points out the ability to provide user experiences on scales from large infrastructure networks to the millimetre-accurate individual assets, all capable of being viewed from land, sky and sea, and below the Earth’s surface.
“A 3D geospatial view is the most intuitive way for owner-operators and engineering services providers to search for, query, and visualise information about infrastructure networks and assets,” said Bentley CEO, Nicholas Cumins.
Following the acquisition, Patrick Cozzi, CEO of Cesium, has been appointed as Bentley’s chief platform officer, leading the development of the combined Cesium and iTwin platform offerings.
“As infrastructure sectors become more data-centric, the importance of an open ecosystem will only increase,” added Peter Rabley, CEO of OGC.
“As the leading voice for open standards and interoperability in the geospatial community, OGC welcomes the ongoing commitment of Bentley and Cesium to solve global challenges through open, interoperable platforms.”
