Previously, the following individual products were offered for pressurized water modeling:  

• WaterCAD Standalone 
• WaterGEMS 
• HAMMER 

These products share many common elements, including the file format and aspects of the standalone interface. Consolidating into a single product line will eliminate the need for users to purchase multiple standalone licenses while enabling us to serve users more efficiently and improve the buying and user experience. 

The following products outlined in the table titled OpenFlows Water: Capabilities by Tier below this FAQ will be consolidated into a new product license/subscription offering. Please note that as a result of this consolidation, future licensing and usage of the OpenFlows products will utilize the consolidated product lineup effective July 1, 2024. 

All current commercial models (perpetual licenses under SELECT subscriptions; Virtuoso subscriptions; term licensing; and Enterprise 365 (E365), EPS 365, and ELS subscriptions) will continue to be available for the new OpenFlows Water product line. 

All users on active contracts for OpenFlows WaterCAD, OpenFlows WaterGEMS, and OpenFlows HAMMER are impacted by this change. Existing users can continue to use the product versions and feature levels they are currently using. There is no a need to reinstall products or select different feature levels. Depending on your contract, the benefits and timing of consolidation impacts will vary. Please read the response below to the question "How does this change impact existing contracts and license entitlements?" 

These changes will NOT impact users with inactive (non-SELECT) perpetual licenses or users of non-commercial versions such as those available via our textbooks. 

This consolidation is part of a Bentley initiative to simplify our product portfolio and improve the buying and user experience for our products. We've received frequent questions about the overlap and difference in functionality between our legacy products, WaterCAD, WaterGEMS, and HAMMER, with specific confusion about the integration of these products within CAD and GIS platforms. 

Additionally, the licensing of these products sometimes created confusion in terms of selecting the "pipe level" and the inclusion (or not) of the AutoCAD integration from the separate "Feature Level Selector" tool. This consolidation should minimize the confusion in the future so that users can more easily utilize the appropriate license tier for their contract and project. 

After the consolidation, users will: 

• Better understand what's included in the licenses and be able to determine what licenses are necessary for their work. 
• Have the capability to run in standalone mode and use multi-platform integration with common CAD and GIS software (Advanced and Ultimate tiers only).   
• Have a price range that enables cost efficiency when modeling smaller systems. 

Additionally, users in the Standard, Advanced, and Ultimate tiers will benefit by having access to transient modeling (HAMMER) in addition to the functionality of WaterCAD or WaterGEMS (Advanced and Ultimate) without having to purchase separate products. See table further below.

Users with enterprise and term-license enabled contracts will have access to the expanded functionality of the new product line when the administrative change takes place in July 2024. Effective July 1, 2024, all term license and enterprise license usage will be allocated under the new product tiers and pricing. Users of prior version products and discontinued feature levels will be charged according to the product equivalent in the table below. 

All SELECT and Virtuoso subscriptions will be subject to the new product name and yearly price established by the consolidation, effective upon their renewal anniversary. SELECT users may enjoy the expanded functionality of the new product tiers before renewal; however, continued access to the new product tiers will require renewal of the SELECT contract for at least one year. SELECT subscriptions that are not renewed will have perpetual licenses issued only for the originally owned product and feature level and not any additional products or increased feature limits or functionality gained by the consolidated product. Virtuoso subscribers will only have access to the expanded functionality after renewal. 

If you have any questions about this consolidation that aren't addressed in any of our Communities pages linked above, we encourage you to engage with our webchat on www.bentley.com, where a member of our team will guide you through any remaining inquiries you may have.  

Does this change impact configuration of OpenFlows license usage alerts and Default Access? 

Bentley's Subscription Entitlement Services allow users to set threshold limits to trigger warnings when you're about to overuse a license. However, following this consolidation, you should reset the threshold limits for this new license based on your new entitlements, even if you had previously set the threshold limits for the individual legacy applications. If you do not reset your threshold limits, your engineers will not be notified when they're about to overuse the number of licenses you're entitled to.  

For instance, users with access to both WaterGEMS and HAMMER may have a combined license pool under OpenFlows Water (depending upon tier equivalence). Instead of two groups of users each sharing one license, they may have a larger single group of users sharing two licenses.  

For more information on how to update these threshold limits in the Subscription Entitlement Service (SES) Entitlement Management center, please visit this Communities page:  https://bentleysystems.service-now.com/community?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0019019  

We strongly advise account admins to reset these threshold limits before installing and running OpenFlows Water 2024.  

Note that because the quarterly term license fees (the overuse charges) are now based on the new OpenFlows product equivalent and license price rather than on the legacy product and the old license price, concurrent usage fees have the potential to affect a larger base of users than in the past (though depending upon your renewal process, your license count will also increase to reflect the total quantities of all subproducts).  

Similarly, if you previously had Default Access set to deny access to all products except for a list of exceptions, your Administrator will need to change this in Entitlement Management to allow access to the new products.

What if I already own multiple water products that are being consolidated? (i.e. WaterGEMS and HAMMER, WaterCAD and WaterGEMS, etc.)

Existing users of WaterCAD, WaterGEMS, and HAMMER will see each license they own upgraded to a license of OpenFlows Water with a tier (Essentials, Standard, Advanced, Ultimate) equivalent to the license they own today. This means that users who license both WaterGEMS and HAMMER (or any combination of the included products) will receive an equivalent license of OpenFlows Water (see below table) for each license currently active in SELECT or via Virtuoso subscription.  

For instance, a user with one active license for each of HAMMER and WaterGEMS unlimited pipes will upgrade to having an OpenFlows Water Advanced license (equivalent to HAMMER) and an OpenFlows Water Ultimate license (equivalent to WaterGEMS unlimited pipes). Since OpenFlows Water Ultimate includes the functionality of both WaterGEMS and HAMMER, this user may decide to keep only the OpenFlows Water Ultimate license (if the same person uses both WaterGEMS and HAMMER and they would not be used concurrently on different machines) or they may decide to keep both. 

Your initial renewal statement will always have a one-for-one license equivalency. You may wish to consult with your Bentley renewals representative once you receive the initial statement to determine the optimal number of licenses to move forward with considering the needs of your users and any redundancies in the consolidated product line. The following diagrams outline a straightforward renewal as well as a renewal that may benefit from license reduction. 

After July 1, 2024, any usage of the existing products WaterCAD, WaterGEMS, and HAMMER will automatically be recorded as usage of their corresponding OpenFlows Water tier. All users who own perpetual licenses can continue using those licenses without upgrading or reinstalling the product. Entitlements to licenses will also automatically be updated to enable usage of the appropriate OpenFlows Water tier. 

Any users in enterprise contracts or contracts using term licensing should be aware that continued use of pre-consolidation product versions and feature levels will be recorded as usage of the new product line (and appropriate tier), and term license and enterprise pricing will exist ONLY for the new product levels. For instance, a user continuing to use WaterCAD 2000 pipes can continue to use the product and feature level, but under term licensing and enterprise contracts, usage will show in reporting and invoice as use of OpenFlows Water Advanced. 

Following July 1, 2024, all new releases of WaterCAD, WaterGEMS, and HAMMER will be made available under the installation for OpenFlows Water. There will not be a need to download these subproducts separately.  

Versions of WaterCAD, WaterGEMS, and HAMMER, available before July 1, 2024, will remain on the individual download pages for those products. OpenFlows Water will have releases from July 1 and beyond.

We always encourage users to use the latest product version to take advantage of functional and security improvements. Users are not required to migrate to using OpenFlows Water, but those who don't will miss out on the latest product updates. 

We recognize that many of our users will want to continue using pre-July 1 versions of WaterCAD, WaterGEMS, and HAMMER for various reasons. We will continue to support these products through our standard support life cycle. Currently, no date has been set to retire these products. 

You may continue accessing WaterGEMS at your current feature level through the remaining duration of your subscription. When your subscription renews, it will automatically renew as the new OpenFlows WorkSuite subscription at the appropriate tier. Users subscribing to the unlimited pipes Water WorkSuite will renew with the OpenFlows WorkSuite Ultimate, which packages OpenFlows Water Ultimate and OpenFlows Sewer Ultimate. Similarly, users subscribing to the 5,000 pipe Water WorkSuite will renew with OpenFlows WorkSuite Advanced, which packages OpenFlows Water Advanced and OpenFlows Sewer Advanced.  

Users subscribing to the 1,000 pipe Water WorkSuite are the only ones who will see different functionality as well as a lower price – they will renew with OpenFlows WorkSuite Standard, which will require them to uninstall WaterGEMS and SewerGEMS and install OpenFlows Water Standard and OpenFlows Sewer Standard, which do not include GIS integration and some advanced functionality. See the table in the below section for the functional differences between the Standard and Advanced tiers. 

NOTE: The current OpenFlows Water WorkSuite and future OpenFlows WorkSuite are currently available only via Virtuoso Subscription. 

Prior to this change, users of HAMMER enjoyed no limits on pipes for transient simulations. OpenFlows Water will include HAMMER functionality in the new product portfolio at the Standard, Advanced, and Ultimate tiers. All current users of HAMMER will be transitioned to OpenFlows Water Advanced, which has a limit of 5,000 pipes (generally sufficient for most transient simulation cases). If you currently use HAMMER and want to maintain access to unlimited pipes in transient simulation, you will need to upgrade your transitioned license from OpenFlows Water Advanced to OpenFlows Water Ultimate. HAMMER is now also available at the Standard tier, with a limit of 1,000 pipes.

Note that if your account currently includes an unlimited or 10,000 pipes license of WaterCAD or WaterGEMS, there may not be a need to upgrade a license because those products transition to OpenFlows Water Ultimate, which will include access to HAMMER unlimited pipes.  

We encourage you to engage with our webchat on www.bentley.com, where a member of our team will guide you through any remaining inquiries you may have. 

The pricing impacts of this product transition will vary significantly depending on which products and tiers you currently license. For many users, the new product pricing will be consistent with their current subscription costs.  Other users may have an increased cost but will have gained product functionality and/or the ability to analyze larger systems.  

We encourage you to engage with our webchat on http://www.bentley.com, where a member of our team will guide you through any remaining inquiries you may have. Also, note that you will get a renewal advice summary detailing changes well in advance of your renewal date.