Bentley Systems, Incorporated ($BSY)

Now, and Greg's already had one meeting. We're delighted to have Bentley Systems back here at the conference in London again, and have Executive Chair, Greg Bentley. Greg, thanks for joining us. It's wonderful to see you again, and so wonderful to have you here to talk about Bentley Systems. I think probably it would be great just to give a level set for everyone as to what Bentley Systems is and a brief overview of the company.

Thank you, Bob. So I'm the oldest of 5 Bentley Brothers, the other for all substantive engineers who founded Bentley Systems in 1984. I all have recently retired, including me, but we remain the majority economic owners of the company and the majority of the Board of Directors. So you should expect long-term orientation in how our company makes decisions. We describe ourselves as the infrastructure engineering software company because we are the digital quarter masters, if you like, that provide the modeling and simulation tools and the enterprise collaboration environments for civil engineers, structural engineers, geotechnical engineers and those who work for them and by virtue of their work in terms of end markets, we are, we think, the leader in infrastructure engineering software for the public works and utilities sector. And within that, for the subsectors of roads and bridges, rail and transit, grid and water, we're the leader in, we think, in the resources sector that includes mining and environmental modeling. And we participate also in the industrial infrastructure sector and the commercial facilities, infrastructure center sectors, but there we're not the leader, and you might describe that as vertical infrastructure. We think we are the leader in horizontal networks of infrastructure, as I first described. Our business is -- reflects 42 years of penetration. There -- 2/3 of our business are with accounts that spend $250,000 a year or more in ARR for our portfolio of products. There's 200-plus among them who spend over $1 million a year with us. Accordingly, we're 93% direct sales and our -- the majority of our mainstay enterprise ARR is through a consumption program where we charge per application per day, which also brings us transparency in our revenue and ARR accounting and in our margins and direct sales leverage helps us to grow our operating margins 100 basis points per year as we get more efficient to have reached about 30% in adjusted operating income less stock-based compensation, the way we measure that, and that flows directly into cash flows in a rather transparent way and we reached 35% in free cash flow margin. In general, the basis of valuation, if you like, we grow those free cash flows in the mid-teens annually our ARR, we grow in the low double digits. And so the basis of valuation for our company has doubled every 5 years, certainly has 5 years since our IPO in 2020. And it's our job and expectation to continue to be able to do that.

Sounds like terrific financial performance. I think everyone in the room recognize that the market has recognized it and -- always not enough, Greg. We know that, right? So -- but it needs to catch up with what the reality is of how you're continuing to grow the business. So -- and so can you talk through that financial performance and how you think about it and how you allocate between M&A, cash dividends, stock repurchases, how is -- how do you think about your financials?

Well, as a public company, we were able to do 2 what we describe as platform acquisitions of $1 billion magnitude in 2021 and 2022. We took on some convertible debt to do that. And that -- if you count the convertible debt as debt, our leverage was at 5x or so. We've worked it down over the past few years to 2x or so and are at equilibrium now where our priority for capital allocation would continue to be programmatic acquisitions. We'd like -- we're always able to do another platform acquisition, should that come along, but it's very fortuitous when that might occur, and we can't plan on that. We do make sure to repurchase stock at least to make up for what otherwise would be dilution from stock-based compensation which is important to a company like ours, but is reasonable in our case. And in recent years, we have repurchased about than last year about twice that much stock, given the level of our stock price. And we also pay a modest dividend.

Wonderful. So we're not going to get into politics, but there was a bill that recently passed out the Transportation Committee called BUILD 250. And so that's moving through the house. what could this mean for Bentley?

Well, during the -- the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act in the U.S., which was the first serious long-term infrastructure investment at the federal level in the U.S. But that's almost 5 years ago now. And so that bill will expire during this year. There's still a lot of money to be spent in the future from it. But during that period of time, we and the engineering community urged that the approach to think about in the U.S. would be longer rather than faster for infrastructure spending. So it is reassuring that this bill, which so far is only in one part of the legislature continues the level of funding with slight increases for surface transportation. That is the job of this committee that's released this bill. So surface transportation is highways and bridges, but that's been traditionally what's funded at the federal level in the U.S. So it's good to have another 5 years rather likely to -- there might need to be a short-term extension of existing funding, but that looks like the future for surface transportation, which is a good thing for us. The other areas covered under the IIJA that will soon expire where federal funding for broadband grid and water in addition to surface transportation. But those areas -- in those areas, there was no lack of private funding in the case of broadband and grid and water is funded more so at the local level in the U.S. So those sources will continue. That's not the remit of this new bill, but no one's concerned in those areas, especially a broadband and grid. Grid especially the concern is not funding levels, but permitting levels. And this bill does what it can to address permitting obstacles for surface transportation, but there still needs to be permitting reform in many countries, including the U.S. to be able to expedite investments, especially in the electric grid and especially the transmission high-voltage portion of it, which will be much to our benefit when it occurs.

Yes. As Americans, I think we can both agree that there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built and Bentley will be right at the center of that as it continues to grow. So it's taken me the question 4 to get to the thing that everyone likes to talk about, is that AI. So can you help us understand how Bentley is positioned in this age of AI that we talk about every day?

Well, the positioning for AI, the -- what first comes to mind is how zealous and enthusiastic we are about the new opportunities this opens up. It literally is the springboard for our new generation of management. And first to say in terms of positioning our -- we don't think we're particularly vulnerable in what we do in software to incursion from AI. We don't have any administrative software that might theoretically be vulnerable to being self coded. And engineers modeling and simulation software is the way in which they conduct their work and is subject to their compliance responsibilities and personal and organizational, professional and legal liabilities, that work is not going to be done by software that's probably right. It has to be provably right. But in terms of opportunity, which is the way to think about it and sort of in order of revenue immediacy, AI opened for us, a new opportunity we call asset analytics which is instant on AI for owner operators of infrastructure. The owner operators of infrastructure are half of our business, the other half being the engineering firms who are their supply chain. But for owner-operators asset analytics is a new process of using drone flights, especially and other sensing and surveying methodologies to automate the inspection and monitoring of their infrastructure assets. And then the next stage -- the next step is to apply our engineering modeling and simulation applications to derive engineering insights to improve the operations and maintenance. And so that's a business that's underway and so far has reached recurring revenues of about $50 million for us. And there's a litany that I'll shorten of AI initiatives in our company as with any company, but that would include new products that are AI native and are percolating through but capabilities from those products that we're extending throughout all of our applications, for instance, to automate drawing production from engineering models. But the perhaps the most exciting one that we can talk more about is the opportunity to provide agentic expansion of what an engineer can do to improve the quality as well as the quantity of their work with agents that are on their behalf rather than as a substitute for the engineer.

Good. So let's kind of stay on that same theme because it would seem that what you're talking about is engineers being more productive using AI. And so how do you think -- how do you see that impacting your seat-based consumption and kind of your overall ARR?

Our application consumption should increase substantially with AI and -- the thing about infrastructure engineers is there is severe resource constraints on their capacity, and they can't do any more work. It's very important to make them more productive. And for instance, just saving them the tedium of drawing production will enable them to do 20% more projects that tackle the backlog and allow their firms to bid on more work finally. But it is -- they're supplementing their attended consumption. What we currently charge for today, they sit in front of a computer and instruct it. When instead they spin up AI agents on their behalf, we get to terrific new capabilities to improve their work. And the model under which they work, the commercial model generally is that they're being charged by the hour, infrastructure under operators are paying for infrastructure design for the hourly time of engineers. That means that a project minimizes the amount of time spent and has a limited budget during which the engineer can produce one iteration of the proposed design. With AI, their agents will be able to run in the background and optimize multiple iterations, hundreds or thousands of iterations in our first MCP server for structural engineering software in the first production project, we tried, the result of optimizing was to reduce the material cost by 40% and through this optimization process enabled by agentic AI. But across our portfolio, I envision that the -- in addition to optimizing projects for cost and materials and carbon, we'll be -- the engineer will be able to have an agent which will optimize the constructability by running in the background while the design is being done, our SYNCHRO 4D modeling software, the sort used to construct these buildings where you simulate the occupancy of space and time and be able to deliver a project that's constructible as well as optimized in terms of cost to be able to have an agent that looks in project-wise, the system of record for prior designs and which is AI ready for such searches by virtue of our iTwin schema defined modules that can be reused that would improve the performance for an owner because they'll be maintaining consistent kit. You would have an agent that could be investigating the subsurface conditions with our sequence software because otherwise, the risk in ground conditions is what causes project overruns, Ultimately, through Bentley Infrastructure cloud, the AI agents will be able to look at the performance of comparable assets and recommend those components, which have been most maintainable, for instance. So overall, there will be a much better quality of work that's possible, that will help the engineers charge appropriately for the value of their work.

But you don't see this as a risk that your customers will use the AI agents themselves or build them themselves and reduce their overall spending with you.

The -- our accounts should absolutely be encouraged to develop these agents themselves, the more that they do, the better. They have, especially the largest accounts with whom we're working most closely our E365 teams that are deployed within these accounts are helping them to introduce these agentic AI workflows now the -- we don't charge for them at the present time. We're only charging for attended consumption. The much greater API agentic consumption, we will charge for in the future, but our approach is to proliferate it as much as we can to have the value understood and appreciate it and assessed and then we'll work out in an acceptable way to a mutually acceptable way to charge for that in the future. But the -- our accounts should allocate their AI development to such agents, which start at the top for what it is that they optimize and how they do the trade-offs and brand and market that to owner operators. They have little incentive or opportunity to start at the bottom with the fundamental engineering logic that is already tried and true and for which it would take years to have some substitute replace that. The -- if we talk about the economics here, what we charge for our software in E365 is about 3% of the cost of an engineer's day. What -- in a project overall, a design project about 1% considering everything else that gets done besides engineers software time is spent on software. The total design is about 5% of the total installed cost of an infrastructure project of the trillions of dollars spent in every country for infrastructure projects annually, or if you work it out, 1% times 5%, 5 basis points get spent on software and computing. With everything I've described with agentic AI, incorporated in the project on behalf of the engineer it will be well worth spending multiples of that to get better performing infrastructure with less project risk. And so the opportunity with AI for us is orders of magnitude, more spending on software and computing more comparable finally to the rest of the economy that isn't slowed down by this time billing commercial model.

And with trillions of dollars being spent all over the world on huge infrastructure projects, it seemed that you're positioned well to capture so much of that.

It's a really worthwhile thing to work on. And AI is bringing forward the future for us, if you like. The things we have wanted to do with our software are more feasible and in front of us at the moment, and it's really exciting to do that. Over the 42 years of our company, we've reinvented the technology underlying our software meant multiple times, that continuity in doing that is what has made us successful because of the longevity of infrastructure design projects and infrastructure assets, which is forever, to be able to have that continuity and yet incorporate new technologies such as AI. AI is software, by the way.

Yes. So let's talk about the concept of headless software. It's gaining attention, obviously, due to AI. Is Bentley at risk of losing mind share with customers if your software is increasingly being accessed through an external LLM provider?

Well, the LLM are going to be great to devise and run these agents to direct this process, but the value of the process is in the underlying modeling and simulation software. And no, we're not worried that highly educated engineers are going to confuse what's doing their work and livelihood as they already know and trust Bentley. So this is not a concern for us. Headless software is great and better. The more there can be, the happier we are.

So one of the things that we've heard a lot about, I think, just probably in the past 3 to 6 months has been software companies have announced layoffs to fund AI and some of you already spent their annual token budgets. I think that's probably been the talk of the past couple of months. How is Bentley thinking about funding AI investments and how may that change your overall cost structure in the future?

Well, our CEO, Nicholas Cummins says the proportion of what we spend in the future on R&D will go up. We'll have more developers, everything else in our company will get more efficient, faster with AI, and there's no end to our appetite to go on the software development road map that we can tackle much quickly at a much higher, much faster pace now. The cost of tokens to do that is not going to sneak up on us because we already manage our R&D, what we call head cost. So head cost is not just compensation. It includes the cost of cloud consumption. So we're already considering and bearing this cost while we continue to grow our development resources. I might point out that over our 42-year history, every engineer has the best, most capable workstation that you can imagine. And traditionally, these have been graphics workstations and the G in GPU computing means graphics. Software developers will have lots of local resources to run their trained coding models. And I think our engineers, especially will because they will be testing the software. AI is software that our users will have a choice to run in a hybrid environment these optimizations that I'm describing can often be run locally on sovereign AI environments or in cloud computing for -- when that performance is needed. But we should remember that the infrastructure design data is sensitive and confidential and needs to be secure. And the same is true of the intellectual property of engineering firms and owner operators, it's -- their data is their property to be -- to train their models for their purposes. It's not ours or anyone else's. So there will be actually a premium on hybrid environments and sovereign computing.

Yes. I'm sure that's clearly the case. And as people worry about what's happening in the world of LLMs to their data and how it's being monetized by others in the future. So resources have been a nice growth driver for the business as of late, as you mentioned. What are the drivers? What are those drivers? Are they susceptible? And if they -- excuse me, are they sustainable? And if the sector continues to grow faster than the company average, does that induce more cyclicality into your business?

Well, resources is our term for the sector that includes mining upstream oil and gas, environmental modeling generally. And this year, that has been a contributor to our strong start for the year, in ARR growth terms. We might have some concern about cyclicality historically in mining, but our sequence software is in the main used during the operation of existing mines where every scoop of ore brings you new information to improve your 3D modeling of the subsurface. But we do have -- we do benefit from an increase in new mining activity. The thing is this may not be a typical upswing, but rather has a secular motivation, a secular driver, which is the determination by each country in the world now to become more self-sufficient in terms of their supply chain and especially critical resources. And we can suppose that will continue to be the case foreseeably given the geopolitical situation in the world. A further driver for Seequent, our subsurface modeling company is the opportunity for all civil projects in the world to be ground informed because that's where the risk traditionally has laid. We've quadrupled that aspect of Seequent business over our 5 years of ownership, but it's still the case that only about 30% of projects include the subsurface modeling. New data centers are starting to change that in the way they think about their potential need for water resources in the future. And anyway, there's -- this is a very strong sector for us. Our Seequent overall is growing on the order of twice as fast as the company. And generally, applying 3D below the ground. And why is it different than above the ground? Because above the ground, we can see and sense and survey, but below the ground, we can only sample with drill holes and boreholes, and then we need to interpolate and understand the -- with mathematical geological models, what lies below, but that -- applying 3D modeling for that is still a frontier that is expanding to our benefit. So these are reasons I think it's generally okay for our company because we have such a flywheel, as I've described, our role, the number of engineers isn't changing much because as many as are retiring as our joining the workforce and the new ones are generally in India and China, but they're all working full out. And that's rather predictable in terms of our traditional business, ARR, and it's appropriate and okay for us to take on some volatility. Asset analytics is of that nature as well where we compete for large procurements in the inspection and monitoring opportunities for major utilities across, for instance, their fleets of cell towers or distribution poles, for instance, where we've started. But we -- it's a good idea, I think, for us to take on some volatility at the margin in order to place our bets to grow faster.

So you touched on a topic that I think is of interest to all of us these days, which is data centers. So can you speak to how Bentley is positioned for the build-out and power needs of data centers these days?

Well, first of all, the data center market is one reason that engineering firms are as busy as they are. And so confident about their backlog and future work, which is reflected in their commitments to our E365 program with floors and ceilings to bound their consumption in future years. So we benefit overall from data centers, but from -- in a broad way, but specifically for data centers, while they're vertical infrastructure, if you like. So the design itself is likely to be done with other software. Our structural engineering software is probably used in each case and our geotechnical software for the foundations in each case. But the need to construct them as fast and efficiently as possible is requiring our SYNCHRO 4D modeling software, the same one used in these buildings to build in London with no layup yard possible. That technology is being used in data centers as well. So that's our first level of benefit directly. Next, each data center is a campus requiring utilities. So the roadways, the water networks and so forth are where our software is used in each such case. But then even more broadly than that, at the macro level, data centers increase this need for critical minerals and copper and ultimately, water, including aquifers and geothermal energy, where our sequenced software is always used. So it's a contributor on all those fronts.

Yes. It sounds like there's a nice flywheel effect just in that segment of the business for you. So has been a strong growth driver since the time of the IPO, so 5-plus years ago. How much more runway do you think you have for that to continue to be a strong growth driver for the business?

Well, we didn't explicitly address small and medium businesses prior to our IPO and our new management appropriately have approach this again through direct sales and increasingly digital. We never did an e-commerce transaction before going public 5 years ago, but it's become a strong contributor adds 3 basis points of ARR growth reliably and over 600 new logos for each of the past 18 quarters now. What we are on our learning curve focusing on now is the upsell and cross-sell opportunity to SMB accounts who have joined us -- it's still perhaps 1/4 of our business and the -- their turn out to be as many infrastructure engineers who work for small, medium businesses for us, we classify those with 50 engineers or fewer. There are as many such engineers and no smaller firms as they are in the larger firms. So you can see that there is continued opportunity for us there and reaching them digitally, they prefer to do self-service. They don't particularly want to talk to a salesperson. They're ending up acquiring software. And by the way, it can be even more specialized software, the more -- the smaller firms can be more specialized firms and use more specialized and expensive software subscriptions, but they don't particularly want to talk to a salesperson, but our inside sales people are engineers themselves and we provide engineers as well to help them use the software. So when they first say, "Gosh, we know of the reputation of Bentley Systems software. We know the large firms do the large projects with this software hadn't thought that I might drive with Bentley dental, but actually, if you'll help me, it's worked out pretty well for them, and we do have considerable remaining upside there."

And so there's still plenty of small and medium-sized businesses all around the globe to tap into.

That's where half of engineers work, and it's very worthwhile for us to have now focused on that opportunity -- that incremental opportunity.

Great. When you think about the other growth drivers, you've talked a lot about getting bigger in the operations and maintenance phase of infrastructure. Why is this an attractive market for you? And what are the capabilities that you have today and where are you going with them?

The opportunity for digital twins in infrastructure is an opportunity largely to improve and optimize operations and maintenance. That's the -- that's where the bulk of spending occurs. That's where all of the benefit occurs during operations and maintenance. And the norm at the present, unfortunately, is that the work of the engineers is only utilized during project delivery and never thereafter. So to have an as operated engineering model can improve the resilience and safety and life cycle performance of an infrastructure asset, but it used to be hard with AI and our asset analytics approach, we can stand up a digital twin overnight with drone flights and other capture of that sort we started with cell towers because they're owned by organizations that are private. They're providing the broadband for the rest of us, and they're inclined to be progressive toward technologies. From the drone flight you have video overlapping imagery, our software processes overlapping imagery into a reality mesh model that is engineering ready and you actually perform engineering, but you then bring in the engineering models because the first thing you do is identify whether the cell tower can accommodate more equipment and therefore, generate more revenue. But each such piece of equipment would require that the wind resistance be remodeled and the structural sufficiency be calculated again an electromagnetic interference and so forth. So to be able to have the AI and computer vision be supplemented with the structural and other engineering models is the approach that is launching us to this large opportunity to address, and we now do distribution poles and we'll go on to transmission towers and other such structures, roadway miles. These will be large business opportunities that will be gained by someone. It would be us, we think, because we incorporate the engineering and logic and the engineering models to get insights from the survey modalities. This is our preference for approaching the operations and maintenance opportunity. The driver is the opportunity for owner-operators to spend less on maintenance because they won't do -- they won't need to do guide book maintenance and often they have to defer that because they can't afford it. If you continuously survey, you -- it's more economical and you avoid dangerous things for humans to do. You can observe what maintenance is working and when maintenance is required and because you're continuously monitoring and rerunning the structural sufficiency and so forth, you can do only that maintenance, which is working and is necessary and spend less and the digital twin can cost less than nothing with asset analytics. So that is truly a tremendous opportunity, we charge per asset. So it's a whole incremental business model in addition to our traditional business of charging per engineer. And we're -- this is our preference for how to tackle the opportunity in operations and maintenance. We wouldn't, for instance, acquire administrative software for work order management and so forth and immediately become antagonistic to the incumbents who provide that already for infrastructure or owner operators. We'd rather integrate and add engineering models through digital twins in this respect.

So we began our conversation talking about the Bentley family and you and your brothers. And a couple of years ago, you moved to Executive Chair and brought in Nicholas as your new CEO. What are you most pleased with that you've seen with him over the past couple of years? And what should we continue to expect from them in the future?

I'm so pleased. It's hard to call out something, but I'll say balance. We -- in our generational succession, the first time in our company I've been CEO for 30-plus years. We wanted a balance between left and right brain. We've always done better on engineering and less well on marketing, for instance. And we focused on large accounts and left out SMB in the past and so forth. And I think we've really succeeded with in that. Another aspect of balance is in executive talent recruitment, Nicholas has really recognized that the importance of what we do in the world. And now that we're a public company with a bit higher profile, we can and, therefore, should attract talent from around the world. By the way, Nicholas is based here in France -- in Europe, in France. And he has been not settled for less than top global talent that continues to please me and the opportunities we talk about with AI are in great hands.

Great. Well, we do have a few more minutes in case there are any questions that we want to take from the group.

Thank you very much for your attendance today. This live stream has now concluded. Thank you.