Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced that its protest of the California Department of General Services’ (DGS) procurement process for roadway design software (RDS) has been denied. The software was being solicited on behalf of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and the protest denial was issued by the California Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH). The protest was prompted by DGS’ disqualification of Bentley from the bidding due to allegedly inadequate documentation in its written response to Request for Proposal (RFP) RDS 2660-421.
Prior to the public bid opening, two of the three software companies submitting an RFP response (Carlson, headquartered in Kentucky, and Bentley, headquartered in Pennsylvania) had been disqualified, leaving only Autodesk (headquartered in California) to participate in the required software demonstrations to the evaluation committee. In Bentley’s 27-year history of leadership in providing software for civil engineers in every state, this is the first time it has been disqualified from any roadway design software RFP.
CEO Greg Bentley expressed strong disappointment at the denial of Bentley Systems’ protest of the California DGS’ procurement process. Said Greg Bentley, “Having evolved over more than five years of close cooperation with Caltrans to work out how to most effectively move ahead, our bid would have directly saved California taxpayers nearly a million dollars while delivering state-of-the-art designs. This was particularly disappointing since our disqualification was based on disagreements over the adequacy of a few textual descriptions in our response, not the competitive evaluation of technical substance and costs that I think we and Californians deserved.” Read More
