The 2011 Golden Valve Awards showcased innovative uses for SmartPlant® and SmartMarine Enterprise engineering design software. For the first time in the competition’s history, there was a tie for the “Best of Show” in the annual Intergraph Golden Valve Awards. COSCO Shipyard Group and Keppel FELS Limited shared the top honor. Both images were created using SmartMarine 3D and SmartPlant Review and depict an isometric view of a semi-submersible drilling rig.

The Golden Valve Awards competition is sponsored by Intergraph and recognizes the most innovative and well-executed uses of software supported by Intergraph Process, Power & Marine. The winners were announced on June 6, 2011, in Orlando, Florida at Hexagon 2011, Intergraph’s annual international users conference.

I attended the Intergraph 2010 conference last week in Las Vegas. It was held in the spanking new Casino resort called ‘Aria’ in the ‘City Center’. Aria is a beautiful hotel with great restaurants and the most high-tech rooms than I have ever stayed in before.

The conference was well-attended with over 2,000 attendees. Intergraph was very generous with free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and evening entertainment for all attendees. There were more than 50 partner booths and a number of educational sessions.

I listened to the keynotes by Halsey Wise (President & CEO) of Intergraph. He talked about how Intergraph has shown consistent financial performance with both revenue and profits growing for the last 7 years. He also mentioned that the customer satisfaction rating has gone up during the last 12 months. He also announced that he will leave Intergraph next month when merger with Hexagon is completed. He introduced Ola Rollén, President and CEO of Hexagon who will take over his role at Intergraph with the current heads of PP&M and SG&I divisions reporting to Ola. Ola then came on the stage and talked about the rationale for the merger.

Ola joined Hexagon in 2,000 and since then Hexagon has acquired more than 50 companies in last 10 years including Leica, ERDAS, and Novatel. It has 7,500 employees in 39 countries. Hexagon has traditionally been a ‘measurement’ company. With Intergraph’s acquisition it moves a little beyond that label.

I interviewed Mark Doherty, V.P. and CTO of the SG&I division. I also interviewed the following executives:

1. Scott Warner, Director of GeoSpatial Services, Avineon
2. Peter Schlegel, Managing Director, CAXperts
3. Adian Laud, Consultant, Noumenon Consulting
4. Brian Beha, Director of Partner Solutions, Pictometry
5. Dale Lutz, CoFounder, Safe Software
6. John Leet, Director of Marketing, Skire
7. Carl Taylor, Business Manager, Tekla