Industrial Transformation Blog

We recently attended HxGN Live 2019, Hexagon’s annual digital solutions conference, in Las Vegas Nevada. Three thousand attendees were there to dive into nine different keynotes and over 500 sessions, many with hands-on training. The firm is a global leader in sensor, software, and autonomous solutions headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with 2018 revenue reaching €3,760.7 million (approximately $4.234 billion USD). Its business includes industrial enterprise solutions with €1.941 million in revenue serving the electronics, manufacturing, energy and power, automotive, and aerospace and defense segments. They are known in the manufacturing world for 3D design and simulation technologies (predominantly for process assets), positioning and location identification mapping capabilities, metrology equipment, and an array of other sensors. The event included a bevy of new product launches across every major division of Hexagon.

LNS Research recently attended HPE Discover 2019 event in Las Vegas, hosted by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The company had $30.88 billion in revenue in 2018, and is focused on Edge, hybrid cloud, and intelligent data. The conference was a well-executed event with well over 9,000 attendees and 8% growth over last year. The highlights were demonstrations and presentations on cool use cases in exciting topic areas:

In May 2019 LNS Research attended AspenTech’s annual user conference, OPTIMIZE 2019 in Houston, Texas. This year's event drew a broad range of attendees ― in all 1,000 from 300 operating companies and ten leading universities, across 50 countries. The software vendor was also joined front and center by a major partner, Emerson, which showcased the integration of its Mimic™ Operator Training System (OTS) with AspenTech's HYSYS simulation software, and its expanding set of asset optimization services for typical customers. With some 150 breakout sessions, it was impossible to cover all tracks, so I spent the majority of the time focused on asset performance management.

2019 marks the third consecutive year LNS Research has attended and covered Gensuite’s annual customer conference. This year’s edition, BREAKTHROUGH: Gensuite Conference 2019, was held in Cincinnati May 5-7. The event spanned the environment, health, and safety (EHS) software vendor’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and Gensuite experts were on hand to convey how the company’s solutions enable breakthrough operational performance improvement across EHS, risk, security, sustainability, and quality among others.

In April 2019 LNS attended the first annual IBM IoT Exchange event held in Orlando, FL. The company focused its three-day conference on how to achieve operational efficiency and effectiveness, and reduce costs through the application of IoT data and artificial intelligence (AI).  The conference marked the first time that users of IBM’s engineering lifecycle management (DOORS family), enterprise asset management (Maximo portfolio), facilities lifecycle management (TRIRIGA), and the Watson IoT Platform solutions all met together under the Watson IoT umbrella.

Over 4,000 people attended Epicor Insights 2019 in Las Vegas the week of April 15. As in previous years, the conference showcased new products and upgrades from a leading supplier of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for the mid-market, with users across manufacturing, distribution, service, and retail companies.

The Smart Manufacturing Experience launched its first edition of manufacturing event on April 30, 2018 at the Boston Convention Center. The 3-day event, which focused mostly on Smart Manufacturing, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), additive manufacturing, and augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), witnessed several hundred presenters and attendees from an assortment of companies including IIoT Platform start-ups, industrial analytics providers, 3D printing companies, and big technology players like Microsoft, PTC, among others.

Uptake has had a busy couple of months, and no one could argue the company is still in stealth mode. Recent notable events include:

• February 2018 - Hires Ganesh Bell as President, formerly Chief Digital Officer at GE Power
• April 2018 - Holds first annual analyst summit at HQ in Chicago
• April 2018 - Announces acquisition of Asset Performance Technologies, Inc. (APT)

Infor, an enterprise software company, brought together the analyst community at its New York headquarters for another Innovation Summit to share updates on progress and plans for its product set. The Infor senior leadership team, backed by several customers, walked analysts through the entire product portfolio. Often perceived as “the other ERP company,” in the shadow of SAP and Oracle, Infor deserves more credit for innovation and adoption of future trends and technology. Infor was the first of the major enterprise application players to embrace Cloud and user experience, and was a very early proponent of analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Much of the progress Infor made has been in industries outside of manufacturing like healthcare, transportation, retail, and in standard business functions such as human capital management (HCM). Manufacturing and asset-intensive industries should take note as they will benefit from the advances the software vendor is bringing to the market, in addition to all the Cloud capabilities directly associated with manufacturing in relevant CloudSuites. The Innovation Summit featured several end-users who made it clear they see Digital Transformation as their only option.

Last year was big for the environment, health, and safety (EHS) business function, regarding the technology available to manage it, and industry developments that impacted EHS. For the most part, the trends we projected in our 2017 trend and impacts to watch blog were realized, or at least advanced substantially.

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