Bentley Systems acquires Ivara to expand asset management impact

Focus of acquisition to improve information mobility across broad base of assets.

By Bentley Systems September 18, 2012

Bentley Systems has acquired Ontario, Canada-based Ivara Corporation, a provider of asset performance management (APM) software solutions for organizations in asset-intensive industries, including mining and metals, power generation and utilities, oil and gas, and petrochemical.

The Ivara EXP solution – a core system mission critical to operations and maintenance, combined with a proven implementation methodology and the Aladon Network’s seasoned reliability practitioners – helps owner-operators to obtain the best performance, reliability, and safety from their assets.

APM software supplements and leverages value in transaction-oriented enterprise asset management systems such as IBM Maximo and SAP EAM by helping to build and implement asset-specific reliability strategies. Ivara is an IBM Member-Level Partner with Certified Ready for Tivoli integration as well as an SAP Software Solution Partner.

“When I first visited Ivara and, of course, took notice of the ‘Work Smart’ logo in their offices, I soon realized that this was not just words and graphics, but a touchstone of the company culture – consistent with Ivara’s heritage, since 1996, of growth and success,” said Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley. “Now all of us as colleagues are enthusiastic to share our Bentley Systems’ objective of ‘Working Smarter, Together’ – with each other, our users, and with innovative technologies – to enable infrastructure to perform better and more safely for constituents, now especially through operational excellence and reliability.”

“The Ivara acquisition may be our most significant in years, because it creates an unprecedented opportunity for us to leverage information mobility – not only within but between CAPEX and OPEX, by way of our ProjectWise and now-expanded AssetWise platforms, with shared services for asset lifecycle information management,” Bentley said. “With Ivara and our resulting APM focus we are today accelerating information mobility – in terms of the amounts and types of information productively reused – by software innovations ranging from interactive inspections to health modeling, which apply consumer-driven technology advances to ‘industrialized’ projects and environments.”

“All of us at Ivara look forward to working with our new colleagues at Bentley to redefine the scope of asset performance management,” said Paul Marshall, formerly CEO of Ivara and now Bentley vice president, asset performance. “Through Ivara EXP, AssetWise will now be able to uniquely link as-designed, as-built, and as-operated information models.”

This marks Bentley’s second acquisition in the operations arena this year, the first being InspectTech for transportation asset management. InspectTech software-as-a-service, the market leader in inspection and bridge safety, helps owner-operators to plan, collect, and manage inspection results, and to meet asset management mandates.

“Bentley’s acquisition of Ivara is a very positive step towards enhancing owner-operators’ returns on their investments and further incentivizing them to make additional investments in infrastructure to help sustain long-term economic growth around the world,” said Andy Chatha, president and CEO, ARC Advisory Group.


Author Bio: Bentley Systems (Nasdaq: BSY) is the infrastructure engineering software company. They provide innovative software to advance the world’s infrastructure – sustaining both the global economy and environment.