Ola Rollen's opening keynote (See brief video of opening session) urged the more than 3000 attendees at the Hexagon 2012 user conference to consider how the growth of the global population has impacted the competition for limited, natural resources worldwide. As such Rollen believes that Hexagon's portfolio of technology products integrates well to forge solutions in areas of infrastructure management and environmental stewardship.

"We need to think forward to predict what lies ahead; and to measure and detect what is relevant and to predict when change is going to happen … [We need] to think forward to see change; and then to improve productively over and over again," said Rollen. He also commented how there is a need for real-time information in order to "close the gap between actions" necessary to make sound decisions.

Juergen Dold, president of Hexagon Geosystems emphasized why it was so important to have highly accurate and time-sensitive information to mitigate potential disasters. He discussed how visualization is a vital part of what users have to do to make decisions and why utilization of 3D technology improves activity planning and operations.

John Graham, president of the Security Government & Infrastructure division is leveraging all of Hexagon's divisions to support the development of new products and solutions for mobile workforce management, outage management, incident management and critical infrastructure protection.

Process, Power and Marien president, Gerhard Salinger discussed Hexagon's solutions to help customers to design, build and operate industrial plants such as large mining projects in Chile. His division is integrating Leica Geosystems laser technology  to create 360 degree photographs that provides plant managers with unique visualization tools.

Metrology division president Norbert Hanke discussed how his division is helping such diverse companies such as SpaceX, that recently completed the first successful commercial launch and docking with the International Space Station, to insure accurate alignment of parts, as well as NASCAR'S Hendrick Motor Sports for finely tuning a car's handling at very high speeds.

In short, Hexagon has a powerful portfolio of products, solutions and the integration story to support a wide variety of engineering disciplines. It's challenge is to let more people know about its integration story.

Disclosure: Hexagon supported travel to this conference.