Hexagon 2011 User Conference, Building a Smarter World June 6-9, 2011

Hexagon has announced Hexagon 2011 with the theme "Building a Smarter World." It will be held June 6 - 9, 2011 in Orlando, Florida USA. This international Conference will include Intergraph, ERDAS, Leica Geosystems, and Hexagon Metrology technologies.

See: http://www.hexagonconference.com/. There is a 1-minute video from Ola Rollén, and other customer interviews as well.

This conference fuses the multiple user conferences held by the separate geospatial entities into one conference, making for greater networking opportunities.

Some of you ERDAS folks remember the early 1990s when ERDAS had a solid user conference of its own drawing around 400 users. Now, Atlanta as a venue was OK (attending Braves baseball playoff) games in the evenings, but honestly Orlando is much more interesting.

Hexagon’s Ola Rollén Oct 2010 Geospatial World Interview

Selected questions and answers from Hexagon’s Ola Rollén in an Oct 2010, Geospatial World Interview

What would be different at Intergraph under your leadership?

“Hexagon will bring in more aggressive investment and re-investment to keep customer satisfaction and belief in Intergraph intact. Process, Power and Marine (PPM) business of Intergraph has grown significantly in the last few years but I do agree that GeoMedia has not advanced as much as it should have. There is definitely an opportunity for Hexagon to turn it around. It is a great product and with capital investments of Hexagon, I am quite confident of bringing it to the required levels and Erdas will provide a great support and help in this endeavour.”

Shall we presume that Erdas will get integrated with Intergraph?

“Yes, we can presume that Erdas will become a part of Intergraph as it makes more sense to be integrated with Intergraph and at the same time Zeiss/Intergraph (ZI) will become a part of Leica Geosystems. There will be an exchange of technology between the two groups.”

Acquisition of Intergraph, for sure, puts Hexagon well ahead of other geospatial companies, making it the leader of the geospatial market. Such a position also puts extraordinary pressure to not just maintain the leadership position, but also to invest in market development and provide direction to the industry. What specific plans do you have to address this situation?

“Hexagon is one of the leaders of the geospatial industry and we understand our responsibility well. In the short term, we have the obligation to provide a more competitive GeoMedia for traditional and loyal users who relied on it for decades. In the long term, I think it is even more important to provide a path to the GIS user to remain competitive against the large movements led by Google and Microsoft as they begin to encroach upon the professional GIS space. I think that's where Hexagon could provide a more stable solution to professional GIS community to further their profession.”

http://geospatialworld.net/