Hexagon Transforms Industrial Data Management for Manufacturers

Hexagon, a global leader in industrial data and automation, faced a significant challenge: their manufacturing clients struggled to extract actionable insights from complex engineering documents and disconnected legacy systems, slowing decision-making and project delivery. To address this, Hexagon's Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division rebuilt its SDx platform as a modern SaaS solution called SDx2 on Microsoft Azure. By integrating Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Document Intelligence, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, Hexagon's new platform automates the processing, analysis, and visualization of vast volumes of engineering data. The move to a multitenant, cloud-native architecture enabled automated, scalable data workflows and real-time analytics. Microservices architecture with AKS ensures fast, dynamic scaling and zero-downtime deployments, while elastic pools in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale handle terabytes of industrial data seamlessly. AI-powered data contextualization in SDx2 drastically reduces manual processing time—from days to under an hour in some use cases—enhancing data quality and enabling advanced digital twin capabilities. Customers are benefiting from automated facility onboarding, accelerated deployment cycles, and robust data security thanks to role-based access controls and managed identity integration. With close support from Microsoft engineers, Hexagon was able to reduce development effort, technical debt, and infrastructure management overhead. Business impacts include over 90% reduction in facility onboarding time, millions in productivity gains, faster innovation, and improved compliance and data protection.