Bogota Water and Sewer Utility selects Bentley SewerGEMS

• The software will help the utility extend wastewater and sewerage coverage to all of Colombia's largest city

BOGOTA, Colombia, Sept. 13, 2007 -- Bentley Systems, Incorporated today announced that Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogota (EAAB), the water and sewer utility of Colombia's capital and largest city, has selected SewerGEMS, Bentley's urban sewer modeling solution, to support the utility's sewer master plan. The plan's key goals include extending wastewater and stormwater services coverage to the entire metropolitan area of Bogota.

Commenting on the utility's decision to use SewerGEMS, Eng. Orlando Guzmán, EAAB's director of engineering services, said, "After experiencing the powerful and yet easy-to-use WaterGEMS in modeling our water distribution system for the past three years, selecting SewerGEMS to help us achieve our aggressive sewer service coverage goals was not a complicated decision. The responsiveness and professionalism of Bentley's technical support team during these years was also a key factor in our decision."

SewerGEMS is the only sewer modeling solution to include interoperability across four modeling environments: stand-alone, ArcGIS, AutoCAD, and MicroStation. This unique feature allows users to take advantage of their individual skills working in the environment with which they have experience while seamlessly sharing models and files regardless of the environment they prefer to use.

Mr. Guzmán continued, "The integration of our sewer models with our GIS is extremely important to us, and our GIS specialists are already leveraging SewerGEMS' integration with ArcGIS to quickly build and load our models with data from our GIS. But not everyone on our team is a GIS specialist, and that's why we value so much the flexibility of Bentley's technology that allows hydraulic engineers, urban planners, and everyone else on our team to contribute using the straightforward stand-alone interface."

SewerGEMS will also help EAAB engineers minimize sewer overflows in the Paseo Rio Salitre environmental corridor, Latin America's longest. It comprises 54 kilometers of channels and 228 hectares of water detention ponds that interconnect very sensitive urban watersheds in the north of Bogota.

Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogota (EAAB) is a public utility that manages water resources for Colombia's capital city and 10 surrounding cities. Bogota is the most populated city in the country with 8.5 million inhabitants and growth of about 250,000 people per year.

Bentley Systems Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle of the world's infrastructure. The company's comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2400 colleagues globally, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top Design Firms and major owner-operators, and was named the world's No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.

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