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Hexagon held their annual conference, Hexagon Live (HxGN Live), which is their primary user and technology partner event. Intergraph Power, Process, and Marine (PPM) and represents a major player in the Engineering Design Tools market study for plant design. Intergraph was acquired by Hexagon several years ago, and now is known as Hexagon PPM. Hexagon is a large conglomerate of multiple technologies and industries, many of them complementary to the overall business of engineering, construction, and operations management. The major business units and technology sectors of Hexagon are:
1) Safety and Infrastructure
2) Mining
3) Geosystems
4) Manufacturing Intelligence
5) Geospatial
There were major keynotes and session tracks devoted to each sector. I attended all of the keynotes except for mining.
Ola Rollen, CEO of Hexagon, presented the opening keynote where he focused the digital transformation taking place in all industries, but, moreover, in the engineering, construction, infrastructure, smart and secure cities, and in manufacturing. His main message was how all of these industry sectors had to be run on data, connectivity, intelligence, and collaboration. He emphasized how all of the business units and technology sectors across Hexagon could share digital information to leverage the capital project.
Safety and Infrastructure: Smart Safe Cities This keynote and sessions focused on Hexagon technologies and solutions for making cities safer and more secure in an increasingly insecure environment. While there was indeed a lot of focus on cyber security and safe information sharing, this was really more about how to use next-generation technology to provide physical security and to coordinate multiple agencies such as police, fire, emergency management, and communications. Hexagon Safety and Infrastructure specializes in command and control centers that enable interagency communication and collaboration using advanced technologies like mobile wireless centers, unifying physical security monitoring (video cameras, perimeter security, etc.). This includes intelligence gathering for threat assessment, UAVs/drones, mobile robots, etc. Also, leverage technologies from sister business units for Geospatial and Geosystems like virtual mapping and largescale virtual modeling for cities and facilities.
Power, Process, and Marine (PPM) New President Matthias Stenberg (replaces Gerhardt Salinger) presented an update and overview of PPM. Stenberg comes from within Hexagon, previously being the head of Hexagon Corporate Strategy. PPM, whose primary industry sector is oil and gas, has had a fairly tough two years in the EDT market. They do want to move more into BIM, however. Stenberg pointed out how the oil and gas industry has yet to make enough changes from business strategies of the past. His contention is that O&G has to make the move to a smart digital facility, and do it rapidly. He sees it as PPM’s job to help lead them with the digital transformation. He sees four major areas of potential for O&G: 1) Bring more automated processes to the capital project to help improve the profit margin which is very low for major capital projects in plant design and construction. (Mfg. – 6.35 percent, Construction and Ops. - .57 percent) 2) Better execution. Construction is 45 percent of cost of capital project. There is a lot of R&D for engineering, but only 1 percent of R&D spend invested in better construction methods. PPM offer new Smart Construction solution that leverages IT and collaboration. 3) Better Interoperability. New Hexagon IoT platform. 4) Data. IoT readiness = data readiness. Oil & Gas is not there compared to Mfg., Utilities, Telecom. Hexagon is rolling out their Smart Digital Asset (SDA) platform. (see below).
Geosystems: Juergen Dold, President of Geosystems presented a look at how they are fusing reality and perception with their virtual reality tools and reality capturing solutions. Their mission is to push technology to its limits to make virtual reality available to all their customers. Geosystems is primarily Leica Systems technologies, which Hexagon acquired years ago. They use everything from laser scanning point cloud technology to single photon Lidar technology to scan and capture the real world from brown field plants to cities and everything in between. They have coined a new term: Perceptiality: The fusion of perception and reality to augment perception with digital reality.
Manufacturing Intelligence: Hexagon has had a Metrology business unit for years that has basically served the discrete industries, and more specifically the automotive sector. This was technology like coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), laser gap inspection systems, and other inspection systems. The Metrology business has now become Manufacturing Intelligence, and the most significant part of this business unit is the recent acquisition of MSC, the simulation and product test solutions provider. MSC is one of the oldest simulation (FEA, CFD, Stress, etc.) providers still in business, and can trace their roots back to NASTRAN simulation first developed by NASA in the 1960s. Norbert Hanke, President of MI, sees Hexagon moving into solutions that support Industrie 4.0, and intelligent, autonomous factories. MSC CEO, Dominic Gallello, presented a look at some of the advancements in simulation technology that would support intelligent factories. MI also has a IIoT strategy that is similar to Siemens, but not on that scale. I asked if PPM was looking at MSC simulation solutions for plant design and infrastructure, and they indicated that they were looking at leveraging the technology.
Geospatial: Mladen Stojic, President of Geospatial focused on a theme: “Escaping the Flatlands”. Essentially, Geospatial provides technology for mapping and GIS. Stojic explained that Escaping the Flatlands was just about moving from a 2D world to 3D, but moving beyond the confines that traditional geospatial technology limits users. Using new data sources to accurately map all regions of the world and enhance that 3D mapping with many additional data points. Building new generations of smart cities will depend heavily on this technology. Stojic was joined by Robert Cardillo, Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (GEOINT). This intelligence agency is a part of the NSA, and is responsible for global intelligence gather based on geospatial technology. This is a highly-evolved intelligence discipline that can not only determine where global threats are, but who and why.
PPM has rolled out a new solution for Web-based project collaboration – the Smart Digital Asset (SDA) Platform. This new platform will support PPM’s overall Smart Construction initiative, as well as operations and maintenance, cloud-based collaboration, and completions and commissioning. SDA is a common collaborative information platform, and while not specifically replacing PPM’s Smart Foundation, moves well beyond its capabilities. The basic strategy of SDA is significantly improving capital project time and cost issues, and provide much higher levels of project collaboration and efficiency, which represents one of the most glaring problems for construction projects today.
Takeaways:
It appears that Hexagon PPM is turning a page, shedding the Intergraph name, moving into Smart Construction and rolling out SDA. It will be interesting to follow their journey into other industries (AEC/BIM) and not solely dependent on O&G.
1) Safety and Infrastructure
2) Mining
3) Geosystems
4) Manufacturing Intelligence
5) Geospatial
There were major keynotes and session tracks devoted to each sector. I attended all of the keynotes except for mining.
Ola Rollen, CEO of Hexagon, presented the opening keynote where he focused the digital transformation taking place in all industries, but, moreover, in the engineering, construction, infrastructure, smart and secure cities, and in manufacturing. His main message was how all of these industry sectors had to be run on data, connectivity, intelligence, and collaboration. He emphasized how all of the business units and technology sectors across Hexagon could share digital information to leverage the capital project.
Safety and Infrastructure: Smart Safe Cities This keynote and sessions focused on Hexagon technologies and solutions for making cities safer and more secure in an increasingly insecure environment. While there was indeed a lot of focus on cyber security and safe information sharing, this was really more about how to use next-generation technology to provide physical security and to coordinate multiple agencies such as police, fire, emergency management, and communications. Hexagon Safety and Infrastructure specializes in command and control centers that enable interagency communication and collaboration using advanced technologies like mobile wireless centers, unifying physical security monitoring (video cameras, perimeter security, etc.). This includes intelligence gathering for threat assessment, UAVs/drones, mobile robots, etc. Also, leverage technologies from sister business units for Geospatial and Geosystems like virtual mapping and largescale virtual modeling for cities and facilities.
Power, Process, and Marine (PPM) New President Matthias Stenberg (replaces Gerhardt Salinger) presented an update and overview of PPM. Stenberg comes from within Hexagon, previously being the head of Hexagon Corporate Strategy. PPM, whose primary industry sector is oil and gas, has had a fairly tough two years in the EDT market. They do want to move more into BIM, however. Stenberg pointed out how the oil and gas industry has yet to make enough changes from business strategies of the past. His contention is that O&G has to make the move to a smart digital facility, and do it rapidly. He sees it as PPM’s job to help lead them with the digital transformation. He sees four major areas of potential for O&G: 1) Bring more automated processes to the capital project to help improve the profit margin which is very low for major capital projects in plant design and construction. (Mfg. – 6.35 percent, Construction and Ops. - .57 percent) 2) Better execution. Construction is 45 percent of cost of capital project. There is a lot of R&D for engineering, but only 1 percent of R&D spend invested in better construction methods. PPM offer new Smart Construction solution that leverages IT and collaboration. 3) Better Interoperability. New Hexagon IoT platform. 4) Data. IoT readiness = data readiness. Oil & Gas is not there compared to Mfg., Utilities, Telecom. Hexagon is rolling out their Smart Digital Asset (SDA) platform. (see below).
Geosystems: Juergen Dold, President of Geosystems presented a look at how they are fusing reality and perception with their virtual reality tools and reality capturing solutions. Their mission is to push technology to its limits to make virtual reality available to all their customers. Geosystems is primarily Leica Systems technologies, which Hexagon acquired years ago. They use everything from laser scanning point cloud technology to single photon Lidar technology to scan and capture the real world from brown field plants to cities and everything in between. They have coined a new term: Perceptiality: The fusion of perception and reality to augment perception with digital reality.
Manufacturing Intelligence: Hexagon has had a Metrology business unit for years that has basically served the discrete industries, and more specifically the automotive sector. This was technology like coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), laser gap inspection systems, and other inspection systems. The Metrology business has now become Manufacturing Intelligence, and the most significant part of this business unit is the recent acquisition of MSC, the simulation and product test solutions provider. MSC is one of the oldest simulation (FEA, CFD, Stress, etc.) providers still in business, and can trace their roots back to NASTRAN simulation first developed by NASA in the 1960s. Norbert Hanke, President of MI, sees Hexagon moving into solutions that support Industrie 4.0, and intelligent, autonomous factories. MSC CEO, Dominic Gallello, presented a look at some of the advancements in simulation technology that would support intelligent factories. MI also has a IIoT strategy that is similar to Siemens, but not on that scale. I asked if PPM was looking at MSC simulation solutions for plant design and infrastructure, and they indicated that they were looking at leveraging the technology.
Geospatial: Mladen Stojic, President of Geospatial focused on a theme: “Escaping the Flatlands”. Essentially, Geospatial provides technology for mapping and GIS. Stojic explained that Escaping the Flatlands was just about moving from a 2D world to 3D, but moving beyond the confines that traditional geospatial technology limits users. Using new data sources to accurately map all regions of the world and enhance that 3D mapping with many additional data points. Building new generations of smart cities will depend heavily on this technology. Stojic was joined by Robert Cardillo, Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (GEOINT). This intelligence agency is a part of the NSA, and is responsible for global intelligence gather based on geospatial technology. This is a highly-evolved intelligence discipline that can not only determine where global threats are, but who and why.
PPM has rolled out a new solution for Web-based project collaboration – the Smart Digital Asset (SDA) Platform. This new platform will support PPM’s overall Smart Construction initiative, as well as operations and maintenance, cloud-based collaboration, and completions and commissioning. SDA is a common collaborative information platform, and while not specifically replacing PPM’s Smart Foundation, moves well beyond its capabilities. The basic strategy of SDA is significantly improving capital project time and cost issues, and provide much higher levels of project collaboration and efficiency, which represents one of the most glaring problems for construction projects today.
Takeaways:
- Hexagon appears to be an industry and technology leader in providing solutions for the emerging area of Smart and Safe Cities. They provide technologies that allow for the creation of virtual cities on a very large scale.
- PPM has specifically moved away from providing a BIM solution set, according to Patrick Holcomb, Vice President & Chief Strategy Officer for Hexagon’s PPM division in my meeting with him. Instead, they are focusing on PPM Smart Construction and SDA to move into the AEC/BIM space. This appears to be a sensible strategy since the current BIM market and its players is so well established. PPM is taking an approach similar to Industrie 4.0 in mfg., called Construction 4.0, which calls for a much smarter, more connected, and collaborative environment for capital construction projects. ECOSYS is PPM’s Smart Construction technology solution set, which includes 5D, drones, robots, and predictive intelligence.
It appears that Hexagon PPM is turning a page, shedding the Intergraph name, moving into Smart Construction and rolling out SDA. It will be interesting to follow their journey into other industries (AEC/BIM) and not solely dependent on O&G.