Amber Hickman |
Hexagon, a provider of digital reality solutions, has entered a strategic partnership with Microsoft with the aim of transforming the manufacturing industry through cloud technology.
Both organisations have worked together to develop and scale the open-source Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay service to support real-time data sharing across a wide range of manufacturing industry processes and systems, including Microsoft 365, in Hexagon’s Nexus digital reality platform.
By integrating Microsoft 365, users will be able to connect documents with their manufacturing tools. For example, cost data in a Microsoft Excel worksheet could be shared with a computer-aided manufacturing programmer, simplifying work practices and decision-making.
“At Hexagon, we’re on a mission to empower the workforce by presenting them with the best available information as soon as possible and helping them to close the gap between their optimal-performance virtual designs and the physical products that they manufacture,” said Stephen Graham, executive vice president and general manager of Nexus at Hexagon. “We have achieved a huge amount with Microsoft in a few short months by collaborating closely and applying their best cloud technologies to unlock new ways of collaborating and sharing data.”
Furthermore, Hexagon’s 3D Whiteboard Nexus tool is now available in Microsoft Teams, which allows users to engage in interactive working sessions with real-time data from design and manufacturing clouds.
Hexagon is also working with Microsoft to integrate generative artificial intelligence into its manufacturing software to provide its users with contextual advisors that will help improve analytics and automation.
“Microsoft’s collaboration with Hexagon is driven by a shared belief that the future of work and productivity is grounded in collaboration,” said Aleš Holeček, corporate vice president of the Office product group at Microsoft. “Similar to how Microsoft applied the Fluid Framework to our own Microsoft 365 applications, Hexagon has extended that same open-source data fabric to manufacturing problems, enabling real-time collaboration between the many engineering disciplines it takes to make a great product, through its Nexus platform running on Microsoft Azure.”
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