Doubling Down on Openness: Patrick Cozzi and Bentley CTO Julien Moutte on Bentley's Acquisition of Cesium

Announcer:
Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together. Hosted by Patrick Cozzi and Marc Petit.

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Marc Petit:

Hello everybody and welcome back to Building the Open Metaverse. Today, we have a very, very special edition to close out season six. My co-host, Patrick Cozzi, is not going to be a co-host today. He is going to be my guest. So Patrick, welcome to the show as a guest.

Patrick Cozzi:

Marc, it's such an honor to be here. We have a lot to talk about.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, we do. We have a lot of news. And we also have with us Julien Moutte. Julien, you're the CTO of Bentley Systems. Welcome to the podcast.

Julien Moutte:

Thank you. Bonjour, Marc. Thanks for having me. A pleasure.

Marc Petit:

We are here to talk about the big news that hit a few days ago where, Patrick, you announced that Cesium was being acquired by Bentley Systems. So can you tell us a little bit what were the key factors that led Cesium to consider being acquired by Bentley?

Patrick Cozzi:

So for Cesium, we've always been taking the big swing on building an open platform for 3D geospatial, and we've certainly seen so much of our developer community creating experiences that combine the natural environment like terrain and imagery and the built environment, infrastructure. We've wanted to go as fast as we can and make as much impact. And we had plenty of options. We were really enjoying growing the company. Business has been very good, but we've known Bentley, I think maybe eight years or so. I have always had a mutual admiration and a shared DNA with respect to open source and open standards, building a platform to support many different developers. Clearly the product's energy and platform's energy is continuing to increase there. So we said, "Geez, it would be a great opportunity to join forces to mutually dial up our vision."

Marc Petit:

So Julien, before we get you to talk about Bentley, do you mind telling our audience who you are and a little bit about your background and your journey to the metaverse?

Julien Moutte:

Oh, happy to do so. I'm French, as you can guess from the accent, but I've been living in Spain for quite a while. Before joining Bentley, I was the CTO of a group at SAP, the German enterprise software company. And that group was focusing on customer experience. So a big team that was working on advertising campaigns and how to help our customers to engage in the most productive way with the audience.  That was my first job as an employee because before that, for 15 years, I've been working in startups that I founded or co-founded with other shareholders.

A lot of those startups were created around the premise of building a company around an open source and free software business. So I'm mentioning this because I think it's very relevant to the conversation. And I've been working around multimedia technologies for quite a few years, trying to navigate the complexity of creating a business model around a project that is truly open source using the LGPL license or the library’s new public license. And how do you create an ecosystem of application developers that are leveraging that technology and where you can potentially develop a successful business model that will allow you to fund the development of that project and create a valuable company?

So I've done that for quite a few years and then joined SAP because I had the privilege of working with our now CEO, Nicholas Cumins who I met when he was in Barcelona. We really enjoyed working together. And when he called me to say, "Hey, we need your help at Bentley to help craft the strategy for the future," I was on board and very excited about the purpose and mission of Bentley, which resonates with who I am. So I was happy to join and now I'm even more excited to be able to bring some of that openness into what I do because this also truly aligns with the values and the strategy we have at Bentley. And I'm excited to talk more about that.

Marc Petit:

Why don't we jump right in and why don't you tell us how does the acquisition of Cesium align with the overall strategic vision and product roadmap of Bentley?

Julien Moutte:

At Bentley, we have... and I've always been very impressed by that, we have such a broad portfolio of products for engineers, for the owners and the operators of infrastructure. So those products, a lot of them are best of breed. They are experts in what they do, whether it's analyzing structures, water networks, power networks, transmission lines, etc., and that product portfolio is both broad and deep. Each of those products have a lot of capabilities, and the strategy we have is that we want to bring those products together through a platform that will allow them to work as one.

Because our users are telling us all the time, "Your products are great. They do so many things for our specific discipline, but if only they would work better together." And peer-to-peer integrations by exchanging files is something that all our users would agree is not ideal. So our strategy has been to create a platform that would create and unite all that portfolio around the creation of what we call a digital twin, a digital replica of the physical asset so that you can have all the context at scale when you're doing your work about everything else that others have been working on, but also what is actually on the ground where you're going to build that infrastructure asset, whether it's survey data, terrain data, subsurface data, etc.

So the creation of that platform is something that has been part of the strategy of our founder and previous CTO, Keith Bentley, who I think you've had on this show previously. He was a real visionary and he was creating this idea quite a few years ago. His approach when he crafted this platform was to make it an open platform, and I think he really nailed it because when you're capturing data, whether it's created by tools or you're capturing the data from the real environment using surveys and drones and sensors and drill cores, etc, all of that data is going to be relevant over the complete lifespan of the infrastructure. And for a bridge or railway, it might be decades or centuries. So when you're getting that data and you're starting to analyze and extract insights from it, you have to care a lot about in which platform are you going to put that data?

It has to be open because otherwise you might be locked in. If the vendor that provided you that platform goes out of business, then what do you do? The first premise, the first principle that was selected when we created that platform to unite our products around digital twins was to make it an open platform. When we mean open, we mean open in the sense that it's using open standards so you can understand the data formats that are being used to persist the data and to exchange that data, which also fosters interoperability, but it's also based on open source.

Because if I give you the spec of Microsoft Excel, and I tell you this is an open standard, you still have to re-implement all of it to be able to work with that data. So providing building blocks that are open source is also an accelerator, an enabler for that community to be able to build on those open standards. And finally open APIs, being able to access and extract your data so that you're not only able to query it, but you can access it, you can potentially take it out and move it to another platform if you want to.

So those were the core principles when we designed the iTwin platform. To be honest, when I look at what Patrick and the team have been able to achieve, it was written on the wall. It's the synergies, the alignment in the vision, and this open approach to creating a platform for application developers, whether internally at Bentley, but also from the broader ecosystem made a lot of sense. So I'm really excited about this teaming that we are orchestrating here and how we're going to be able to be better together to unlock even more value with that open approach, which also resonates with my past experiences.

Marc Petit:

So questions for the two of you. Is there one main synergy that your guys are looking to unlock in the short term?

Julien Moutte:

We have a lot of complementarity, so bringing the platforms together is going to be a massive win for everybody in the ecosystem. At Bentley, we have a lot of data layers. I like to compare a digital twin to a kind of multiple layer data structure. We have a lot of those data layers already. We have positions on earth for a lot of those data layers, whether it's an engineering model, IoT sensor, but also the construction schedule and the enterprise data. But we don't really have a good canvas to present all of that data and to be able to extract insights and analyze it.

I think CesiumJS and the runtimes are falling in just very nicely to provide that kind of lens through which you can look at your infrastructure data. And a lot of the capabilities that we have in the i-Twin platform around computer vision, AI to be able to extract insights from those data layers is going to enrich the Cesium platform and benefit the existing ecosystem of Cesium immediately. So synergies on enriching the platform of both sides are probably the lowest hanging fruits that we're looking at and then potentially in the future, there will be a lot more synergies as we bring a lot of the Cesium technology and open standards in all the Bentley portfolio. I'm impatient to see what the ecosystem is going to be able to build with all of those capabilities as well.

Patrick Cozzi:

Marc, what's interesting here is I would tell the same story from the Cesium perspective. So we started in aerospace, we spun out and did geospatial, and now the developer community is showing us that they want to put a lot of infrastructure in that geospatial context. Hence, we see Bentley as the best way to accelerate that. So the synergies are very interesting, just told from two different storylines, infrastructure to geospatial, geospatial to infrastructure.

Marc Petit:

I'm sure it's a question on everybody's mind. What are Bentley's and Cesium's plans to maintain the open source development model and the commitment to an open standard like 3D Tiles?

Julien Moutte:

As I've mentioned there, there's those three pillars to open it, right? Open standards, open source, open APIs. I think Cesium has done a great job in establishing open standards and making sure they are being adopted, and one of the things we are planning to do now is to strengthen even more this commitment to open standards.

We're going to continue engaging and augmenting the engagement we have with open standard bodies to make sure that we can continue evolving and pushing those standards to cover more of the use cases that all the existing users of Cesium, but the existing users of Bentley are going to be interested to see being addressed. So standards are going to be accelerated by this acquisition, and we are looking at making more and more of the Bentley products consume and use those open standards as well. So there will be more in terms of establishing them, but more in terms also of adoption because we're bringing a lot of users to those existing standards.

When it comes to open source CesiumJS and the runtimes have been developed in the open and so was the iTwin platform. iTwin.JS was developed also on GitHub with a similar license, MIT and we recently moved to Apache to be even more comprehensive with the concept that users might have around pattern protection and stuff like that. And we're going to accelerate that too. We're going to continue developing in the open, continue to develop with open source and free software licenses, and we're going to be bringing the teams together to increase the pace at which we're releasing value to that community.

Then finally on the third pillar, which is really around open APIs, the iTwin platform was designed to be able to extract the data, and as we're going to be looking at how we can bring those synergies to fruition between Cesium and iTwin, we'll continue providing APIs that lets you access the data, whether you want to download your photogrammetry mesh, your BIM models, the historical data from your sensors, we try to make all of that data available using open standards and let you work with the data offline if you want to, and potentially interoperate with other platforms. That's the plan.

Patrick Cozzi:

Then Mark, even going historic here a little bit. So going back to 2016, before GLTF was on the world stage, before 3D Tiles were on the world stage, we were working with Bentley and Bentley was using those open standards. In fact, when I did 3D Tiles, I did it on my own as part of Cesium and then Scott Simmons, who I believe you know from OGC came to me and said, "Hey, you should bring that to OGC and you should do it through the community standard process."

And part of that was to form a submission team of people beyond just Cesium to show that there's interest and show that there's adoption. And Bentley was part of that team. So going all the way back to 2016 supporting 3D Tiles there. So as we look forward for open standards, a big appeal of joining Bentley was that mutual commitment and the fact that I think we're going to be able to do more and do it faster there. When we look at where 3D Tiles can go. On the open source side, I think Julien said it really well, and we have all of our existing community, all of our existing customers building on Cesium JS, building on the plugins for Unreal Unity and Omniverse when Bentley is using them everywhere. Well, we want to bring even more resources to those to advance those. So I'm quite happy here.

Marc Petit:

Patrick, what does this mean for your partners and your customers?

Patrick Cozzi:

I think that we're going to get more advancements in 3D Tiles. We're going to get more advancements in open standards. We're going to continue to do all the types of events that we're doing. Cesium competes on openness. We're open, then we compete on merit. I think that ethos there with Bentley is there in spades. That was the appeal.

Marc Petit:

I don't know if it was a coincidence, but a week ago you released an amazing video demonstrating the coming together of IFC and other open standards in the building domain, IFC models and 3D Tiles models. Do you guys share the vision there is a convergence between the world of GIS and the world of AEC?

Patrick Cozzi:

The truth is, I've learned there are things in my life I control and there are things in my life that I don't control. Apparently the timeline of product release I would like to control more than I actually do. Then the timeline of finish an acquisition, I definitely don't control. We absolutely did not plan to have a Tuesday tech preview release and then a Friday announcement of joining Bentley.

But I think it actually worked out beautifully in that it showed this momentum. Because when we announced Tuesday morning, our tech preview for AECO, which is as Mark alluded to, you can take IFC files or a Revit plugin and then bring it into a new preview version of a design tiler, and Cesium ion, that then generates an efficient 3D Tile set, including the metadata for that model. The community responded very quickly and very positively to that. Then three days later they saw us joining Bentley and they're like, "Wow." So I think it's quite interesting.

Julien Moutte:

I agree. It's pretty cool, right? The timing. If we would've tried to make it intentionally, I think it wouldn't have worked as well. But it's one of the amazing synergies. We see that already there is a lot of demand from the community to be able to leverage Cesium to access the AEC data. At Bentley we have created this platform that allows you to federate the data that is trapped in files. You can take an IFC file, a Revit file, a DGN file, and many other formats, and then we extract all of that data, we align it to a common schema, and then we make it available through an open standout, which we call iModel.

We have a tiler for iModel that is able to take all of that engineering data and generate 3D tiles so that you can stream the data at scale to your applications. I think the synergies are obvious. We did not have a Revit plugin just yet. Might be a great addition here to the portfolio, and I think where we are going to be able to provide even more value to those 3D Tiles by having more depth and complexity capture from the BIM models with all the subject matter expertise of the Bentley team there. Because they have been looking at this problem about extracting all the details about the engineering infrastructure and we'll be able to enrich the tiles that we generate even further.

Marc Petit:

Patrick, I noticed you're now chief platform officer at Bentley Systems. So what is that platform?

Patrick Cozzi:

The platform today I'm doing what I did last week. Well first is we got so much positive response from the announcement that I am still going through a lot of text messages, a lot of emails and LinkedIn posts. It's been quite an honor and very emotional to see all of that. As we get that behind us, the platform is both the Cesium that we see today and then iTwin that we see today, and we think the potential of bringing those together and bringing joint value to those users is going to be huge.

Julien Moutte:

Yeah. Congratulations.

Patrick Cozzi:

Well, thank you Julien. Thank you for your support in this process.

Julien Moutte:

This is indeed a joint platform that we're looking to create. So ion users today can do a lot. We believe that we have capabilities that will be very interesting to them, and in the iTwin platform, we're looking at benefiting a lot from the experience that you guys have in making such a compelling and thriving developer ecosystem around the platform. So we will be bringing those two platforms together to create a central platform for infrastructure and the built and natural environment with a fundamental approach to things that is based on geospatial and 3D and all the depths of infrastructure engineering behind it, which are applicable to a lot of use cases.

When you do computer vision on reality models, this is applicable to engineering, but this is also applicable to defense, to aerospatial, to ocean discovery. As we're discussing recently, there's no limit to where those capabilities can be used. So we can create a very interesting platform for this broad ecosystem, and Patrick will be doing that together with me. So I'm super excited to work with him.

Marc Petit:

It also means that a Cesium user can expect to start seeing more technology bringing in from the Bentley platform surface to be made available to them, right? Do you guys have some ideas around that?

Julien Moutte:

Some of the capabilities that the iTwin platform can bring to the table that are not available yet in ion is the computer vision on reality data, for instance, right? This is one of the thing that was on the roadmap of Cesium, and when we started discussing about this acquisition, well, that would be very interesting for the iTwin community because we have services in the iTwin platform that can detect features on point clouds and reality meshes and photos to detect cracks, rust, spalling, vegetation, et cetera.

But we can also train computer vision models where the user can self-service, they can tag and label some of the photos they have, and then automatically this is training a model that would be able to identify those features across everything they have. 

The possibilities are endless here. We can give some services to the ion community where they will be able to extract the power of AI in the geospatial context and create new values and insights. But there's so much more. Bentley is bringing to the table all the subsurface modeling from Seequent. They have a lot of capabilities there. We also have our teams that are working on IoT sensors. IOT sensors are very useful for infrastructure, but it could be useful for other things as well, for small cities and other use cases. Bringing that IoT comprehensiveness into the geospatial 3D canvas is something that I believe is going to be valuable for those users, and there's a lot more. Like I said, the portfolio is very broad. Whether it's structuralizing, mobility simulations, flood simulations, you can see all of those capabilities coming now to Cesium ion and iTwin as a joint platform. I think for users, this will be a source of inspiration for new capabilities and advancements in their applications.

Patrick Cozzi:

Marc, even another simple example is Bentley has iTwin Capture for taking photos, running photogrammetry, and then generating a large textured 3D model. That was previously called Context Capture and that was actually some of the first photogrammetry ever brought into 3D tiles and ever brought into Cesium, but just being able to have a nice workflow that's photogrammetry plus 3D tiling, end-to-end, super simple, probably efficiencies when you look at that pipeline completely so users would be able to do that. Furthermore, we know that there's other solutions out there and Cesium will still have the 3D Tiling pipeline where people can bring their data up directly. So we want to inter-op with the whole ecosystem.

Marc Petit:

I think Bentley is a very important company. It's probably not as known as it should be. I've seen some pretty impressive demos from Bentley where, by using video footage, you can assess cracks in the roads and you can help DOTs maintain the infrastructure. Can you elaborate a bit more on some of the use cases where Bentley is already deploying AI?

Julien Moutte:

We can look at this from two different angles. We are software vendor, so we provide software tools, and a lot of our users are using those tools to extract insights and to get a better understanding of the context. So photogrammetry, for instance, is being used by a lot of our accounts to do a survey with drones and with laser scans. And then they use AI to identify features, to detect objects, potentially dangerous situations and conditions that require maintenance. So this is us providing the tools for engineers to run those tools and to extract the insights they're looking for. But recently, there's also a second angle that we've started exploring and offering as value to our users, which is, well, instead of just the tool, we can provide the insights, we can provide the data directly.

Recently, Bentley made a few acquisitions. One of them is called Blyncsy. In the case of Blyncsy, for instance, we are acquiring data from dash cams of cars driving around the U.S. network. We are applying AI techniques to analyze the feed from those dash cams and then we extract insights. For instance, a pothole that needs to be fixed, a signal that is not visible anymore because it has been deteriorated or it's obfuscated by vegetation. And then instead of selling the software to the engineers, we're actually selling the insights directly to the Division of Transportation, telling them, "Well, you have issues that you need to fix here and there." So there's a lot of capabilities that AI is bringing to the table to automate the work that the engineers need to do and Bentley is becoming more and more of a provider of data and insights to our users with the help of AI.

It's also being used in lots of different places, so whether it is about trying to detect when something might fail. So preemptive maintenance of infrastructure assets is something that is very big. It's not as innovative as the AI use cases we've been hearing about in recent years. It's been here for a while, but it's still very valuable to know that, okay, this pump is starting to show some signals that we know from past experience is going to trigger a failure in the next two months so we should schedule a replacement, or something like that. So there are a lot of AI use cases in asset operations, which we are already delivering today. Now there's a lot of AI that is going to be coming up soon in some of our products. I'm eager to start talking about this a bit more in October, in our Year in Infrastructure Conference, where we start to use generative AI a bit more to try to help the engineers explore the design space faster.

How can you automate a lot of the work that you need to do so that you generate drawings faster, leveraging AI, that you can look at a lot of different potential scenarios on how you could build a design and look at all the impacts on the decisions you might take? Because AI is able to run all those simulations in the background for you and tell you, "Well, this design variant is going to be more sustainable." It's going to reduce waste in raw material, so it's going to be easier to construct, or it's going to cost less because you have less earth to move around as you do the grading. So there's a lot of AI use cases, and we are currently on the journey where all of our teams are looking at how AI can be applied to their products so that our users are becoming more productive with those tools and they can address the huge backlog and all the challenges around sustainability and climate change that they need to address.

Marc Petit:

Let's switch gears a little bit. So, Julien, you mentioned your origin as an entrepreneur, how is it to operate in a big public company, and what can our entrepreneur, Mr. Cozzi, here expect to be different in his new life?

Julien Moutte:

Being in a big company has pros and cons, obviously. I'm being completely honest. There is the inertia of the structure. There is obviously a lot of colleagues and it's hard to know everyone. Every team has different objectives and goals so it takes more energy as a founder or as a leader to be able to rally everyone behind a common goal. So in a startup, when you have 50 or 100 people, well, you can regroup them all and you can have a very heart-to-heart conversation about where we go and try to inspire them, et cetera. When you're trying to operate at scale with 5,500 colleagues all across the globe, it's more difficult. But at the same time, the power you have to have an impact is orders of magnitude bigger. I've been in startups and I was always wondering why, what could we do if we were in a big company where we had more reach with a stronger user base, we had more investment capabilities when it comes to hiring key talent, and doing some advanced research, et cetera?

And now I have the privilege of being in that position where we have the potential to have the impact. We have the scale. I see the challenges about inspiring and rallying the teams behind a common goal, but we are learning every day, and I think we are making some good progress. And this acquisition, to me, is really a clear example of how we can take Bentley into the next stage of growth. And I mean, I have some merit, but I would say that Bentley is quite a unique place as well. Some of that merit is also due to our founders because I guess, Patrick, I hope you will agree, but Bentley is quite a special place. It was founded by the brothers. It's a big company, but there's still that small company family spirit where everybody's talking freely. It's a company created by engineers for engineers so we care a lot about fixing the actual problems, and it's easier to have an impact, I think, at Bentley than in other big organizations.

Marc Petit:

For people who are listening to us, can you give us some numbers? How big is Bentley? What's the revenue, the high level figures?

Julien Moutte:

We have 5,500 colleagues around the globe. It's an approximate number because it's changing regularly and we just welcomed quite a few new colleagues in the last week. We have 41,000 accounts globally, so different companies that are using Bentley software to achieve the infrastructure outcomes that they're looking for. The company, I would have to check more precisely, but I think is around $1.2 billion of revenue.

Marc Petit:

So Patrick, how do you feel about joining? You've been driving your own company. How do you feel about joining a bigger organization?

Patrick Cozzi:

Out of all the bigger organizations we'd want to join, Bentley clearly was my top choice there. Having known the Bentley colleagues and having known the Bentley brothers, the founders, for many years, I'm very comfortable with how the organization is and the DNA. We announced the acquisition this previous Friday. It closed that previous Thursday, and we had the honor of joining the 40th anniversary of Bentley's founding that night, an event that night. So I think that's a nice testament that exactly 40 years after incorporation of Bentley, that Cesium joined Bentley. And you could tell the family vibe and just how people interacted with each other, that a company of 5,500 people, I think that's as good as it gets.

Marc Petit:

I think an exit like this is also a dream for many entrepreneurs. So did you have time to think back about, where do you think you made the important decision that got you to where you are today?

Patrick Cozzi:

The speed at which an acquisition happens, especially towards the end, I was telling folks, there's quite nothing that can prepare you for that professionally. We've raised venture capital before, and I thought... an acquisition doesn't sound that much. But this is a whole other level. So I haven't been able to do a ton of processing, but I don't see... I know people use the word exit, but to me, this is an acceleration of Cesium's vision that mutually accelerates Bentley's vision and business.

I should do some reflection on, hey, what were some of these key decisions that we got right, or what were some of these even key failures that then led to understanding the right thing. But just off the cuff, I think the commitment to open source, and then using that to help drive the roadmap and the vision, because I think people over-credit me as having this exact vision 13 years ago, which I did not. We made our JavaScript library based on WebGL for aerospace visualization, we made it open source. The community started building interesting things, we started asking them a lot of questions about where they might want us to go, and it was that curiosity and that humility that I think allowed us to scope something bigger, and then to also have the trust from the community.

Marc Petit:

So, Patrick, you were involved in many organizations, the Metaverse Standards Forum, OGC. Will you still remain active in those forums? Are you still going to be my co-chair at the Metaverse Standards Forum?

Patrick Cozzi:

Our intent is actually to increase our involvement across these organizations, like Metaverse Standards Forum, AOUSD, OGC, and Kronos. And then, my personal intent is to remain involved, hands-on, in the open standards world. The Metaverse Standards Forum is a great place because it is the center of the conversation.

Marc Petit:

So Julien, do you have any advice for Patrick as he joins Bentley?

Julien Moutte:

You can never go wrong when you're creating products that users rave about, and I think this is one of the key reasons for success at Cesium, right? So when you're listening to your users, you understand what they need, what kind of problems they face, and you deliver solutions to them, then you get the love back. The community is thriving and people love what Cesium has created for them, and this is a key ingredient to success. So first advice I would give is continue creating product that users rave about, this is what we're after. This is a key reason why Bentley saw the alignment and the interest of bringing Cesium in the team, and we want to continue doing that together. So that's why we're going to double down on openness, double down on our investment in stand-out bodies, and we're going to be delivering on that vision, that the Bentley portfolio is going to align and thrive on top of this open platform, so that's one.

The other advice I would give is that even though we are a big organization, everything is possible. Don't be afraid of dreaming big. We have the potential to change the way infrastructure is built, we have the potential to change the way it's operated. Our world needs it, and we need bold ideas, so don't be afraid of proposing the impossible, because we can always look at finding a way to get there incrementally.

Marc Petit:

So Patrick, you know the drill about the shout-out questions, so is there anybody, any person in the organization, you want to give a shout-out to today?

Patrick Cozzi:

I was hoping you were going to ask, Marc, and you know I have to give much more than one shout-out here. So as I think about that one, we built an amazing team and an amazing culture here at Cesium, and we have to give a shout-out, of course, to the entire team that has built this platform, you know many of them, from Sean and Shehzan to Tom to Anatolii. It's really remarkable what we've done together. And of course, a shout-out to the community that's showed us both the art of the possible and the art of the useful to help drive that roadmap. A shout-out to AGI and the co-founders there, Scott Reynolds and Paul Graziani, who supported me when I was a bit of a crazy engineer doing an open-source project, and then said I wanted to spin this out and I didn't even fully know what that meant, and here we are today.

Then also a shout-out to our large partner customer, EARTHBRAIN a joint venture of Komatsu, NTT, and NRI, it was great, and it continues to be great, to have a partner like that, that is vision-aligned, that's building great work on top of your platform. Alternatively, I would've had to raise several rounds of funding, and it might've been harder to be as open as we are, so that's good. And then, Marc, you know I've been surrounded by many smart and motivated and talented people like yourself, who have given me a lot of good advice, just like Julien has given me.

There's one person I want to mention here, Jean Paoli, who probably hasn't gotten as much airtime as he deserves around Cesium. So Jean, he's currently the CEO of Docugami, and then he's the former president of Microsoft Open Technologies, where they did so much in terms of having Microsoft embrace open-source, they ported Linux to support Azure. He was the executive sponsor when Microsoft adopted GLTF, which really made GLTF take off. He has been advising me even since before we spun out. I was this crazy open standards person like, "Will you help me?" Many people would say no, and he said yes. The advice that he's given over the years has been so good, and one day he told me, he goes, "Patrick, you need to decide, you're open or you're not." That drove so much of the strategy and I think so much of the success that the community has been able to build on the platform.

So Marc, I'm sure I have many more shout-outs, but I'll pause there.

Marc Petit:

What about you, Julien? This is a tradition at the podcast towards the end when we ask people about a shout-out, is there anybody, any person in the organization, any institution, you want to give a shout-out to today?

Julien Moutte:

I'd like to give a shout-out first to the executive team and the Bentley brothers. It's really great to see this embracing of openness. It's not easy for a company to take that approach. I'm awed about the vision, that this needs to be a truly open approach, and the support we've received from everyone, the external board members, the Bentley brothers, the executive team at large, Nicolas, Mike Campbell, our chief product officer, and Tom Kirk, who organized all of that conversation and transaction, and that was a lot of work, so kudos to him and his team.

Also, a big shout-out to the teams that have participated in creating the integration plan, because for us, this transaction is really a big success if we're able to integrate and bring those platforms together for the success of the existing developer community of Cesium and the Bentley users, and there's been a lot of work put into that, so a big shout-out to them as well. And a big shout-out to Patrick also for his patience, because it's not easy, as you said, to go in an acquisition process like that, it's a lot of work and a lot of requests that have to be answered in a short time. So I think the overall team has been very responsive, and we managed to close this in record time, which is quite impressive, to be honest.

But then, I have 5,500 colleagues to thank, so I'll stop there, because the iTwin team is also a big contributor to that and the rest of the teams.

Marc Petit:

Well, this is great, thank you guys. Patrick, we've been interacting together for several years now, it's been a pleasure watching you grow up and evolve and now achieving that milestone, joining a bigger organization, so I wish you great success in your new role. I hope you still have some time for us at the Metaverse Standards Forum and with this podcast. Julien, you mentioned Keith Bentley's episode, I think I want to send people back to listen to it, because it was quite a very interesting episode and Keith made the vision extremely clear, and I'm delighted to see you today pushing that vision and making open real. So I think it's a great day for open standards, I think it's a great day for Cesium, and it's a fantastic day for Bentley as well.

So thank you guys for being with us today, and again, a big thank you to our audience. You know where to find us on all the podcast platforms, on YouTube, and on our LinkedIn page. So we're going to sign off, thank you very much for this special episode of Building the Open Metaverse.

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