After splitting off from Swedish positioning and hardware giant Hexagon AB last June, Octave Inc., was listed on the NASDAQ exchange in May and has rebranded many of its software products. But an overall strategy for the new company hadn’t emerged until Octave’s June 17-18 Octave Live road show in Austin, Texas.
For construction, that means more integrations across a broad portfolio as well as more artificial intelligence agents within that port-
folio. The maker of technology products as varied as the BricsCAD family of design tools and the OnCall public safety and dispatch platform used the event to say it is now a project lifecycle information provider.
“Design, build, operate and protect are still silos; each has its own workflow based on customers,” said Kyle Wessells, Octave’s vice president of global portfolio marketing. “Cost overruns, increased risk and operational inefficiency are what’s at stake.”
Octave CEO Mattias Stenberg said several products will bridge multiple pillars of the design, build, operate and protect lifecycle.
The company defined different areas its offerings live in, such as data and intelligence, scale and complexity, and performance and outcomes.
Hxgn SDx2 was renamed InConcert by the new company, touted as a design information platform that can manage several different types of data that are all required in construction. EPCs such as Burns & McDonnell are using it on large infrastructure projects because it can take in or output BIM, GIS and other schemas.
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“What we are trying to do is that instead of reinventing for every customer or every project, we are looking at how can we take the data from all our applications and bring it into that [platform] environment, and then you build from there,” said Vivek Mokashi, Octave’s chief technology officer, in remarks to reporters and analysts.
Stenberg echoed that sentiment, at least when it comes to AECO customers, in his keynote remarks at the conference. At the time of last year’s spin-off, Hexagon was both a software and hardware giant with very little uniformity across both sets of offerings and even within its software business as geospatial intelligence, asset operations, quality, public safety, physical security and industrial cybersecurity all existed alongside design and construction tools.
With the rise of agentic AI, Stenberg said those silos will necessarily have to change, and Octave is already investing in its agentic AI data layer analysis tool named Octave Aria (formerly the Hxgn Alix generative AI platform, released in 2024). When it was rebranded in March, Octave announced that it would exist as the underlying data layer analysis tool, able to provide project teams or owners insights throughout a project or asset’s lifecycle.
“Ninety-six percent of AEC data goes unused,” Stenberg said. “The system was never built to hand data over to the next stage. Everyone in AEC sees their silo. In between the silos is where risk, cost and failure lives.”
Octave’s chief product officer, Jay Allardyce, used his mainstage time to argue that AI will have limits when it comes to designing, building and maintaining large infrastructure assets and design. Construction software won’t go away, he adds, because of more connected workflows. Architects, engineers and construction professionals will be even more necessary to add the context agentic AI often lacks.
Octave has the portfolio breadth to participate in this shift, particularly with large customers such as Burns & McDonnell and Fluor, said Allardyce.
Almost all AEC software providers now say connected intelligence is the future of construction, but actually creating ways for data to flow through different schemas, such as Octave’s “pillars” is the only way to reduce actual risk, he added .
Source: www.enr.com
