Bentley Acquires SPIDA, Developer of Utility Pole Applications

SPIDA’s solutions will be integrated with Bentley’s OpenUtilities engineering software and grid digital twin cloud services.

Bentley Systems is sure busy these days—scooping up new companies all over the world, including SPIDA Software, which the company just acquired this week. SPIDA develops software for design, analysis and management of utility pole systems.

This year Bentley has made a number of acquisitions, including INRO, Seequent and E7 to name a few.

SPIDA, operating since 2007 and based in Columbus, Ohio, is the company’s latest conquest. SPIDA provides software solutions to electric and communications utilities and their engineering services providers and is used by hundreds of companies across the U.S., Canada and abroad that use SPIDA’s solutions for engineering and managing their assets.  

Some of SPIDA’s customers include electric utilities companies such as Ameren, EPCOR, Nashville Electric Service (NES) and Southern California Edison (SCE).

SPIDA’s utility pole solutions include SPIDAcalc for capturing and modeling overhead transmission and distribution assets for structural loading; SPIDAsilk to analyze cable sag and tension design for physical and ambient properties; and SPIDAstudio, a cloud-based platform that centrally tracks and manages the asset health and physical condition of overhead systems.

SPIDA is revolutionizing loading and oversight of utility asset analysis and management of structural health. (Picture courtesy of SPIDA.)

SPIDA is revolutionizing loading and oversight of utility asset analysis and management of structural health. (Picture courtesy of SPIDA.)

According to the press release, Bentley plans to integrate SPIDA with its OpenUtilities engineering software and grid digital twin cloud services to help address the challenges of transitioning to renewable energy sources, such as electric vehicle charging, joint usage of utility poles to support broadband networks’ expansion to 5G and  modernizing and hardening the electric grid.

SPIDA, with many partnerships and integrations with others, including a partnership with SBS, provider of design solutions, helps utility and telecom organizations leverage the power of their investments in utility networks, GIS, CAD and enterprise systems. This May, the two companies announced an integration that connects SBS’s Automated Utility Design (AUD) application with SPIDA Software’s SPIDAcalc structural analysis software.   

Last September, SPIDA announced a partnership with Schneider Electric, Geographic Information System (GIS) solutions for utilities and communication providers. The partnership aims to tighten product integration between SPIDAcalc and Schneider Electric’s ArcFM Designer and offer joint solutions that will streamline engineering and design processes and simplify the challenges of traditional pole loading methods. SPIDA also has a partnership with Esri, maker of the popular GIS mapping software, ArcGIS.

Through the acquisition, the SPIDA Software team will join Bentley. SPIDA is a somewhat small company consisting of about 29 employees. The Bentley team welcomed SPIDA saying, “As the rapid expansion of renewable energy sources and greater demand created by electric vehicles increasingly stresses our grid infrastructure and for 5G-enabled broadband rollout, the grids’ utility poles are ‘priceless’ for sustainably advancing infrastructure,” said Alan Kiraly, senior vice president of asset and network performance at Bentley Systems. “We are very pleased to welcome our new SPIDA colleagues to Bentley Systems and to OpenUtilities, and we look forward to further integrating and globalizing SPIDA software, already known as the trusted stalwart for energy distribution engineers in their essential work to improve grid performance and resilience.”

SPIDA, whose motto is “Build a Better Grid,” certainly ought to be enabled to do bigger and better things with Bentley by its side.

Brett Willitt, president of SPIDA Software, said, “Our vision with SPIDA has always been to provide a complete and open solution for maintaining and improving the health and integrity of our users’ power and communication overhead infrastructure assets. Within the Bentley team, we look forward to accelerating grid digital twin solutions, which leverage our industry domain experience and incorporate SPIDA structural analyses. Existing and future SPIDA users can look forward with confidence to leveraging grid digital twins as they upgrade, modify, expand, and manage their overhead systems.”

SPIDA makes no secret of its passion for utility poles. From the company website:

“Confession: we’re obsessed with utility poles. We’ve been known to pull over on the side of the road to get a picture of that nasty pole on the corner. We’ve worked as make-ready technicians, pole inspectors, and CATV installers. We’ve even made our family members/spouses jump a ditch to look at a pole for us.”

Get an idea of how SPIDAcalc works in this video.