BREAKING NEWS: Chief Product Officer Bhupinder Singh Leaves Bentley Systems

Bhupinder Singh, once Chief Product Officer at Bentley Systems

After more than 26 years Bhupinder Singh will be leaving Bentley Systems. The company confirmed Singh’s departure and said Singh was “retiring.” His last day at Bentley was not disclosed but when reached for comment, Singh indicated he would have more to say after the company’s annual customer showcase, the Year in Infrastructure (YII), this year from October 5 to October 27.

Singh’s LinkedIn profile now states he is a self-employed as of October with Senior Executive under his name.

Singh served as Bentley’s Chief Product Officer (CPO) from 2016-2020. His replacement is Nicholas Cumins out of Germany, who now holds the CPO title, according to Bentley’s leadership page, where Singh is no longer listed.

Before Bentley, Cumins was the general manager of SAP marketing Cloud and also worked various senior roles at SAP, including product management, corporate strategy, and business development in the United States, Germany, and France for almost 14 years.

Singh held multiple roles at Bentley over the years including, Senior Vice President, Bentley Software; Senior Vice President of the Platform Products Group and General Manager of Sales for Bentley South Asia.

We first noticed he was missing from the Year in Infrastructure event page at the end of September, and his previous sessions are now being filled by Cumins.

At past YII’s Singh was always Bentley CEO’s right hand-hand man or so it appeared. He would usually speak alongside Greg Bentley or founder Keith Bentley. We could count on hearing from Singh at those events as he was always one of the main keynote speakers. His presentations were always something to looking forward to as he’d share the technology innovations and shed light on what Bentley has been working on.

Bhupinder Singh. previous CPO of Bentley Systems was replaced on the marquis of the company's annual customer showcase, YII, with new CPO Nicholas Cumins, below.

Singh wasn’t big on social media or at least I could never find him. The last mention of him we could find was on Twitter on August 31, 2020.

We expect Bentley will likely remain tight-lipped about the loss of Singh even as it introduces its new executives at YII.

Looking at this year’s YII event page you will also notice another new face. In July of this year, Bentley named Katriona Lord-Levins its Chief Success Officer and SVP. Prior to Bentley, Lord-Levins worked at Autodesk for 15 years, most recently leading the BIM 360 Customer Success Team.

Frankly, the news of Singh came as a bit of a shock, similar to when Huw Roberts, Bentley’s main marketing face of building solutions left the company, almost five years ago.

Roberts was with Bentley almost 18 years and served as their VP of Marketing and Global Marketing Director. He seems to be doing well as he is now the CEO at Graphisoft, a BIM software provider, a competitor of Bentley. Word back then was that he had retired, but about a year later, Roberts announced his own marketing company Shiny Object Strategies. Then he shortly joined BlueCielo ECM Solutions for a year before joining Graphisoft in March of 2019 and only 6 months later he was appointed CEO.

It will be interesting to see where Singh goes from here. Will he retire? Leave the Philadelphia area? Start a new business? Go to another company?

He’s a smart guy. Singh has a bachelors in civil engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, a masters in computer science (Rutgers) and a masters in civil engineering from Vanderbilt.

Whatever he does, we wish him well.