In May of last year Hexagon acquired a company based in Alpharetta, Georgia called Catavolt that combines internet of things (IoT), analytics and mobility. At HxGNLIve in Las Vegas Ola Rollén in his exhilarating opening keynote - beginning with incredible graphics showing every foot of a young gosling's 400 foot fall down a cliff (which happily it survived) and ending with an incredible slalom ahead of an avalanche punctuated with the skier executing a back flip - announced its new name Xalt and showed a unique example of what it is capable of. Xalt runs in the cloud on Amazon Web Services and collects data from sensors, which could be a metrology (measuring) device, an Oracle database or SAP. It then analyzes the input stream looking for outliers and raises an alarm that causes something else to happen. It could be informing a human that there is a problem or it could be linking to another machine. In the example that Ola showed a measuring device could be seen measuring the precision of what a robot did and when the precision became worse than a threshold, it raised an alert which caused the robot to recalibrate itself. Another example of what the Xalt platform is capable of was demonstrated on the exhibition floor where we were invited to develop an app in seven minutes that integrated data from several different sources. The development platform was a laptop and the resulting app ran on an iPad.
Xalt is an internet of things platform supporting many different sensors and types of sensors, big data analytics and different clients especially smart phones. Xalt supports multiple AI data sources including imagery, video and big data for applications such as predictive maintenance, change and anomaly detection. The platform monitors, senses and acts on all connected data inputs in real time. It accesses sensors from remote locations and utilizes the data to optimize business processes. It includes AI capabilities including deep learning with digital neural networks. From Ola's presentation it is clear it is not intended as a standalone product but rather as a platform that integrates the many and disparate devices and systems that Hexagon has acquired since Hexagon began its incredible journey in 2000 from a Swedish contract metals manufacturer and producer of valves, antennas and pressure vessels to a global geolocation and measurement, design and construction application and visualization technology company with $4.11 billion in revenue and 18,315 employees in 2017. During these nearly two decades Hexagon acquired 64 companies many with geospatial capabilities including Leica Geosystems in 2005 and Intergraph in 2010. The big question for observers of Hexagon's meteoric rise has been how was it to integrate these disparate acquisitions into a synergistic whole that is bigger than its component parts. It is clear from Ola's keynote that Xalt will be the foundation for Hexagon's big leap to achieve this.
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