By Randall S. Newton
Editor-in-Chief
Bentley Systems continued its aggressive string of acquisitions today by buying Haestad Methods Inc., a leading provider of water resource and related civil engineering solutions. It is the fifth company Bentley has acquired since January 2004.
The privately held Haestad Methods provides software and supporting consulting services for design, analysis, and management of water distribution supply, municipal sanitary sewers, urban stormwater collection, roadway and civil site drainage, and flood control. The company has more than 40,000 clients in 170 companies, including more than 10,000 municipalities and other governments. The company was founded in 1979 by John Haestad, who was CEO at the time of the acquisition and will become a senior vice president for Bentley Software. Terms of the acquisition were not announced. The company claims double-digit sales growth in 2003 on revenue of approximately $16 million.
“Bentley's Haestad Methods acquisition is exactly what Bentley watchers and friends like to see,” comments Mark Millman, executive partner at The CMSDK Group and a former Bentley vice president. “By expanding their core offerings to specific business solutions Bentley's long term growth is assured. John Haestad has built an amazing company; he and his colleagues will revolutionize Bentley's Water and Sewer portfolio.”
In 2003 Haestad Methods introduced GISConnect for AutoCAD, a unique tool that allows engineers to work in real time with ESRI’s ArcGIS data while in an AutoCAD drawing session. In a review, AECnews said, “We believe GISConnect offers unprecedented ease of use and ease of access, bringing together two equally important but distinct data types. It belongs in the tool palette of every AutoCAD user who needs to include spatial information from an ESRI ArcGIS database in a drawing.”
“From its founding by John Haestad 25 years ago, Haestad Methods has been an amazing success story,” said Bentley CEO Greg Bentley on announcing the acquisition. “As most experts and practitioners in hydrology and related fields know, Haestad Methods has literally written the book for applying information technology in water systems.”
According to industry analysis firm Farkas Berkowitz & Company, water-quality engineering is a significant growth area in AEC, with annual increases of just over 10 percent per year on a compounded basis for the last six years. “Water-quality engineering has been and should continue to be the most attractive engineering market segment in the U.S.,” notes Alan Farkas. “With this acquisition, Bentley positions itself with a broad-based software offering to water-quality engineers.”
Haestad Methods was the first company in any industry to move software designed for large mainframe computers to PCs, and it was a pioneer in the development of Windows-based hydraulic and hydrologic software applications. In addition to headquarters in Watertown, Connecticut, Haestad has offices in Australia, China, and Mexico.
Haestad Methods’ complete suite of engineering software products for water, wastewater, and storm water management includes CivilStorm Dynamic, WaterGEMS, WaterCAD, PumpMaster, HAMMER, GISConnect, Darwin, WaterSAFE, SewerCAD, StormCAD, PondPack, FlowMaster, CulvertMaster, and HEC-Pack.
Haestad Methods solutions run as standalone applications as well on the AutoCAD and ESRI platforms. Existing Bentley support for these platforms includes MX, from its acquisition of Infrasoft, and AutoPLANT, from its acquisition of Rebis, running on AutoCAD; MicroStation V8 native support of the Autodesk DWG format as well as Bentley’s DGN format; and the Bentley Connector for ArcGIS software supporting workflows spanning AEC and GIS environments.
As with previous acquisitions, Bentley says it will continue to support acquired products that work with non-Bentley solution. For the Haestad portfolio, that means supporting products that work with AutoCAD and various ESRI products. Bentley will also work to integrate these new products into its existing AEC product suite. Specific plans include supporting Haestad Methods functionality on both MicroStation and Bentley ProjectWise.
Since January 2004 Bentley has also acquired:
- The AXSYS line of plant design software from Aspen Technologies;
- ESSI, Inc. for its eWarehouse database technology for plant design;
- CIS, a supplier of MicroStation-based software for routing cable TV lines;
- ISIS, a Dutch software firm specializing in applications for cadastre management.
In January 2004 Bentley secured a $50 million (US) line of credit from Wells Fargo & Company for the purpose of funding acquisitions. The agreement provides for an increase to $75 million in availability if acquisition activity merits such a requirement.
Henniker River Group, LLC, a business development firm, acted as consultants to Haestad Methods and helped facilitate the transaction with Bentley.