In a recent letter to company shareholders, Hexagon CEO Ola Rollén spoke on his vision for how autonomy will continue to empower industry.
On the HxGN Spotlight blog, we’re always talking about the ways in which our technologies are paving the way for an autonomous future by turning outside world obstacles into opportunities for growth. However, we also think that it’s important to look inward once in a while. That’s why we’re pleased to bring you this special HxGN Spotlight series examining the vision put forth in an annual letter to Hexagon’s shareholders by our CEO Ola Rollén. With this three-part series, we hope you can gain a useful peek behind the curtain and see just how much thought goes into making the products that free our customers to do their best work and help industry thrive.
Ola has been at the helm of Hexagon for more than 20 years — no small feat in a world as rapidly changing and adapting as technology itself. While his leadership and vision have led the company through much growth and success over the years, his most recent focus around autonomous data-driven technology solutions makes sense. Let’s take a look at what he had to say in his annual letter to shareholders in March 2022.
“The connectivity of billions of devices and absurd amounts of data was intended to set us free, enabling us to achieve our greatest potential. Instead, the data deluge has us scrambling. We find ourselves in an overwhelmingly complex situation, determinedly endeavouring to use data to make businesses run better and operate more sustainably. Ironically, as our hunger for data grows, so does our inability to harness it—impinging on our freedom and slowing progress across industry. It is for this very reason we chose to make a bold strategic shift toward empowering an autonomous future a few years ago. This strategy targets the rapidly widening gap between data creation and usage, bringing the freedom of autonomy to sensor-software solutions so that data is no longer an obstacle. We’ve been connecting sensors to software for years—this was nothing new. But what was, and still is, revolutionary is creating value by empowering customers to leverage this data in new, world-changing ways—providing the freedom to do their best work.”
This excerpt highlights the cornerstone of Hexagon’s philosophy—the gap between the amount of data generated and the amount that is actually being used to make industry run well, which in turn does good for the planet, is far too wide to overcome with human interaction alone. That’s why we’re dedicated to creating solutions that put data to work on its own, autonomously, freeing us from the constraints of time, distance and knowledge. When data can be optimally analysed and leveraged in real-time, from anywhere, systems can become more intelligent, proactive and robust. One shining example is HxGN Connect—the future of citywide collaboration, knowledge sharing and connected data communities.
HxGN Connect provides government agencies and other diverse organisations with a real-time incident centre as-a-service, giving them greater freedom to provide share awareness and coordinate action for ad-hoc, routine and emergency situations. Users can securely collaborate with people and information regardless of organisational and geographical affiliations or technology limitations—bridging gaps between vertical sectors, organisation types and operational functions. Enabling different departments to securely share data between each other, and even between different cities and agencies, creates seamless communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing for faster and on-the-spot response to changing conditions—which can be immensely powerful in life-or-death situations.
Assistive AI and machine learning are utilised by HxGN Connect to gather and present relevant information between systems and across industries without data overload. Let’s say, for example, you’re running operations for the transportation department of your city. Your system could alert you to bad weather on the horizon using radar from the local weather service, automatically show you traffic cameras, sensors and incident reports in real time as the storm moves in and enable you to collaborate and share information with police, fire, and public utilities for real-time incident response coordination—all from the same platform, updated in real-time as situations develop.
The freedom to accelerate data sharing doesn’t stop at city centres; faster and fuller data utilisation can be a boon for any industry looking to streamline processes and cut down on wasted time, labour and resources. From infrastructure and industrial plants to automotive manufacturing and agricultural monitoring, our customers can easily put data to work to extract its true value and look forward to a future where they can leave the data crunching out of the equation and get back to doing what they do best—their jobs.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this first part of our series, and we’ll have more for you featuring Ola’s insights into an autonomous future coming up very soon!
