Bentley Systems recently announced that it had completed the acquisition of Rebis. Bentley's initial minority interest in Rebis was purchased in January this year.

With this acquisition, Bentley's plant design applications now support both Bentley's MicroStation and the AutoCAD software platform from Autodesk. Rebis' annual revenues are approximately $16M. "This acquisition is of great significance to Bentley and Rebis users, and to the plant design market," said Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley.

"We have strengthened our organisation with a dedicated group of over 100 employees focused on the process industry and all of our respective users will benefit from the capabilities of a more interoperable environment. We welcome the opportunity to continue Rebis' commitment to deliver high quality applications for both the MicroStation and AutoCAD platforms.

"We are also excited by the addition of Rebis' management team and employees which, together with Bentley's, will create one of the deepest and most talented software and implementation teams addressing the requirements of the plant lifecycle," Bentley continued. "I have the greatest respect for the skill and track record of Dr Jeffrey Hollings and the rest of the Rebis team, in achieving consistent growth and profitability."

"Rebis has brought process design solutions to thousands of Bentley and Autodesk users around the world," said Dr Jeffrey Hollings, now senior vice president of plant software at Bentley. "Within Bentley, our vision is to bring interoperable plant design solutions to MicroStation and AutoCAD users, providing not only a tremendous advantage to owner operators and contractors, but also a first for this industry. We look forward to exploiting the capabilities of MicroStation V8 for PlantSpace users, and we remain committed and excited about our plans for AutoPLANT users."

A significant advantage to AutoPLANT users is tighter integration with Bentley's engineering content management and content publishing server solutions. These server-level implementations will let Rebis users better utilise Bentley server products to manage and publish engineering content created with either AutoCAD or MicroStation, and establish integrated workflows with mission-critical enterprise systems.

For more information contact Bentley, 011 462 5811.