Marketing director Rogers says departments of transportation show a lot of interest. SUE recently was demonstrated to transportation professionals in a Bentley-sponsored webinar hosted by Civil & Structural Engineering magazine the day of the business briefing. "[DOTs] have to do 3D modeling as a requirement driven by MAP 21 and their question has been, 'how do you get that information into the database so you can start?'" Rogers said.

Taylor Snow, a transportation engineer with the Michigan Dept. of Transportation, has explored SUE and is convinced that three-dimensional modeling software is the way of the future for utility design and analysis. Further, he predicts SUE's "two major capabilities of being able to synchronize with geospatial databases and run clash detections [means that] SUE will prove to be a very valuable software for utility analysis and, in turn, underground asset constructability."

"Although SUE does not have the capabilities yet to design utilities from a functionality standpoint, the next release, I am told, will," Snow says. "SUE is still very robust in its ability to analyze utilities in order to take the 'educated guessing' out of engineer's design decisions."