The invitation to the launch event from Hexagon raised many questions. The most important—what the heck would they mean by “digital reality?”
First principle—it’s not the idea, it’s the execution that is important.
Remember that first principle. I’m reviewing my notes, and I took many, from yesterday’s online launch event. Thirty minutes into the presentation, I wrote “haven’t I heard all this before” and “30 minutes into the presentation and really nothing new.”
I realize they were setting the stage, teeing up the ball, perhaps even casting a vision. (Sorry for those weak metaphors.)
The key words were ecosystem, open platform, partners, collaboration, digital twin, digital thread, connectivity. Oh, and cloud.
Moving past that introduction, recall that Hexagon has been busy scarfing up companies lately. PAS sold to them and immediately disappeared, for example. Hexagon includes design, operations, metrology, security. That is today’s trend in our manufacturing/industrial software market.
Digital Reality appears to have little or nothing in common with the buzz around virtual or augmented reality. It’s the thing we’ve been working out for the past 10-15 years—aligning all our digital manufacturing data with physical reality. People think that’s a new thing. I worked on the beginnings of a project of digital data for manufacturing reality in 1978.
But, times have changed and technology is much better. This answers a question I usually ask leaders of companies busily acquiring a diverse set of companies—will these work together or are simply building a conglomerate. This looks like a platform designed to get their diverse portfolio to play together and perhaps enhance cross division sales.
Now to look at Nexus.
- Nexus’s open cloud platform allows manufacturers to connect Hexagon and third-party ecosystem
- tools to enable real-time collaboration and feedback between engineering and manufacturing
- a cloud-based metrology trend analysis and collaboration App
- a connected workflow Solution to optimise design for additive manufacturing processes
- an App powered by machine learning that predicts the performance of new materials before they are made
- cloud-native material data management App
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has launched its digital reality platform, Nexus. The new platform applies the latest cloud technologies to unblock innovation bottlenecks, enabling global teams to collaborate in real-time across the product lifecycle – from design and engineering to production and quality – to solve design and manufacturing problems together and accelerate time to market.
Click here to learn more and download the platform.
