By Guest contributor |
Across the industrial sector, organisations are grappling with the same challenge – how to move on from outdated, manual and siloed data practices. The answer is simple and complex in equal measure: digital transformation.
Digitalisation enables industrial operations to grow and thrive. There are countless exciting opportunities, but capitalising on them is not always simple. You need to be equipped with the right tools and know-how, brought about by close strategic collaborations between industry experts.
This is the foundation of Hexagon’s longstanding alliance with Microsoft. Since the early 1990s, this collaboration has enabled us to cross many key milestones. Our product development teams work together and, as Microsoft technology evolves, so do our projects leveraging these digital tools.
Notably, Microsoft has played a crucial role in the development and deployment of our Smart Digital Reality vision. Hexagon’s Smart Digital Reality brings the physical and digital worlds together, with data at the core. By harnessing the right technologies and sensor software systems, organisations tapping into the Smart Digital Reality ensure they are capturing optimised, actionable data. Industries can analyse, contextualise and visualise data into a unified, real-time view of both physical and digital realities.
Hexagon’s HxGN SDx2 is one of the key solutions that drives the Smart Digital Reality. This multi-tenant software-as-a-service solution is cloud-native, integrates real-time data and advanced analytics, and is hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform. Implementing the solution in a large-scale facility increases data visibility and predictability, improves time and cost savings, boosts team collaboration and facilitates smarter decision-making.
Creating this smart reality would not be possible without the Microsoft collaboration. When we released HxGN SDx2 on Azure in 2024, Darryl Willis, corporate vice president of energy and resources industry at Microsoft, said: “Our collaboration with Hexagon exemplifies the transformative power of combining technology and industry expertise to deliver actionable AI-powered insights.”
Collaboration with Microsoft’s cloud-based services continues to be fundamental in helping us to realise our Smart Digital Reality because it enables our digital portfolio to be multi-tenant, scalable and flexible. These traits are foundational to who we are as a company.
By combining the best minds and innovations from both companies, we have built a digital toolkit for our customers worldwide – many of which are essential, large-scale organisations that contribute to all of our day-to-day lives. With smart, real-time insights, these industry giants get a clearer look into their operations than ever before.
Customers no longer need to deploy on-premises infrastructure to support their Hexagon applications in the regions where they operate. This reduces the time and effort needed to get started with a new project or operational facility, while empowering our customers to collaborate on a wide range of devices from virtually any location.
With Microsoft, we can accelerate and improve our technological innovations. By shifting resources to new capabilities, and away from supporting and maintaining multiple product versions, we can allocate more time and resources to look ahead at what the market needs. Dynamic software architecture also provides us with consistent user experience and dedicated resources.
Microsoft’s platforms are also enabling our AI capabilities. Today, HxGN SDx2 leverages machine learning (ML) to identify tags and metadata from engineering documents and contextualise this critical information around the appropriate assets. A similar approach is used to ‘smartify’ previously unintelligent images like point clouds and panoramas.
In addition, we’re using ML technology to develop AI agents that will deliver greater access and insights into industrial data. We are democratising access to industrial data contained in HxGN SDx2 by leveraging Azure AI solutions to develop generative AI agents. Initially, these agents will function as digital interns, quickly locating and retrieving relevant information, before evolving to engineer-level assistants capable of supporting complex technical tasks.
By embracing the latest and greatest technology and data features, we can build a strong security base that supports data segregation, data sovereignty and compliance – an essential requirement in our ever-growing digital environment.
Technological innovation is driving success across industrial facilities around the world and data optimisation is helping organisations to reach their full potential. Our collaboration with Microsoft has helped us build our reputation as an industrial technology leader. As we look ahead to expand our Smart Digital Reality, Microsoft will be close by our side.
Hexagon showcased its solutions at Hannover Messe 2025. Read the full story on the Technology Record website
Marcelo Pagella is senior alliance partnership consulting lead at Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence