Cesium Joins Bentley Systems

General
1

Hi folks,

I wanted to share personally with you that our company, Cesium, has joined Bentley Systems, our long-time partner in digital twins and an authentic supporter of the open ecosystem.

We made this move to accelerate the path to an open platform for you to build 3D geospatial experiences combining the natural and built environment. We started in aerospace, expanded to geospatial, and to Infrastructure / Architecture, Engineering, and Construction. Joining Bentley helps us move much deeper into Infrastructure with Bentley’s iTwin platform and into subsurface with Seequent.

I’ve known the Bentley brothers and their leadership team for years. Bentley was an early adopter of 3D Tiles and CesiumJS, well before 3D geospatial was a thing. Bentley’s DNA fits like a glove with Cesium - an enthusiasm for open source, open standards, and open APIs to empower developers.

Today is a huge milestone for the Cesium community. It is surreal to look back at the journey of CesiumJS as an open source project at AGI - to a spinout venture-backed startup - and now to joining Bentley. I still remember making the first source code commit to Perforce (pre GitHub) and seeing the first red triangle rendered on a black background. And I remember making the first post to this forum when it was the cesium-dev google group. We made an early and successful bet on WebGL; I guess it was a risk, but it didn’t seem that way at the time. Through many humbling twists, turns, and failures, we managed to show that you can do right for the ecosystem with open source and open standards and build a successful business while helping the community build business and create impact.

As you can imagine, the last few weeks and months have been intense. I owe hundreds of personal notes to the community, our team, advisors, investors, partners, users, and friends. I tried to tee these up in advance but time ran short. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has taken part in the journey thus far, whether it be by building experiences with Cesium; advancing open standards; joining us at events; or giving advice and feedback. We are at an inflection point to do even more together!

This community forum is the heartbeat of the Cesium developer community and the developers working on the actual projects are often the folks answering your questions. In joining Bentley, I anticipate that we will be able to provide even more support to you here on the forum and beyond, with tutorials, and other resources.

Check out the blog for more: https://cesium.com/blog/2024/09/06/cesium-joins-bentley

Please help spread the good news and share your thoughts.

Thanks,
Patrick

Chief Platform Officer, Bentley Systems
Founder, Cesium

9 Likes
3

Hi Patrick,
Thank for the update. Just out of curiosity does this mean Cesium is going to be putting all their chips into infrastructure / architecture, engineering and construction? Or are you still going to be focused on aerospace and geo special. Your solutions are great for our little flight simulator / paragliding simulation. Hoping to see more investment into the aviation / global scenery side of things? Best of luck with the new partnership.

4

Cesium is going to continue to broadly support developers building 3D experiences with the natural and built environment. Just like the geospatial community showed us that our aerospace library was useful to geospatial, and then we kept (and even expanded) aerospace - our plan is to do the same once again; the Infrastructure community has showed us that our aerospace/geospatial platform is useful and Infrastructure becomes additive. The visual in the blog aimed to show this, see below.

As for aviation and global scenery side - I dig it - and a lot of core advancements help everything like what we are doing for visual quality in CesiumJS with glTF PBR, IBL, AA, etc. Please share requests anytime on the forum or GitHub.

image
image1322×871 74.4 KB

Thanks!