Bentley Systems acquired geospatial information platform Cesium on September 6. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the deal is expected to close by the end of 2024.
Cesium is a platform for creating 3D geospatial applications. Its 3D Tiles standard has been adopted by Google Earth as the map platform’s 3D scene provider through its Map Tiles application program interface. Photorealistic 3D tiles are a textured 3D mesh with high-resolution images that creates a scene from user data. Cesium has an open application program interface that allows you to use different types of data, be it image files, GIS information or satellite imagery. Bentley has been promoting an open data approach to design using its tools since the introduction of its iTwin platform for digital twins in 2015. The acquisition of Cesium brings a geospatial platform and the data contained within it to iTwin.
“We’ve made some acquisitions to expand our portfolio and increase the depth of many of our tools in different spaces, including GIS,” said Julien Moutte, chief technology officer at Bentley Systems. “We have a special opportunity here. We’ve believed very early on that we need to bring this portfolio together through a platform game.”
Ever since technology vendors started storing customer project data on cloud-based platforms in the late 2000s, they’ve had to deal with the problem that data needs to be structured differently and can be shared for light transmission. This has meant more open APIs such as Cesium’s Map Tiles and more partnerships and acquisitions between companies authoring tools for building information modeling and GIS data, two fields that were previously quite separate between architecture professionals and engineering and planning, respectively.
“CesiumJS and 3d Tile are this open standard for delivering massive models and that’s not just terrain models, it’s infrastructure models,” said Patrick Cozzi, CEO of Cesium, who will join Bentley as executive of the agreement “We’ve guided ourselves to be open, to contribute and engage authentically in the community.”
Data is available for more than 2,500 cities and 49 countries in an open ecosystem of runtimes enabled by 3D Tiles on Cesium servers, including CesiumJS, Unreal, Unity and NVIDIA Omniverse. One customer is equipment manufacturer Komatsu, which uses Cesium to monitor construction sites using its equipment. Moutte characterized the Cesium acquisition as a “duplication” of open data standards in infrastructure design and construction.
“Having an API where you can look at your data but you can never access it is very limiting in a sense,” Moutte said. “We believe that we have to earn the trust of our users, through the features and the value that we provide them, not closing them, not letting them access this data. One of the key pillars of openness not only it’s open. open source and standards, but also open access to APIs.”
