CONCORD, N.C. — On Wednesday, Hendrick Motorsports partner Microsoft launched Windows 10.
As partners, members of Hendrick Motorsports had the opportunity to become early adopters of the program.
“Many teammates are already on Windows 10,” said David Hood, an engineer at Hendrick Motorsports who also serves as a liaison between the organization and the Microsoft team. “We’ve had engineers on Windows 10 for the last couple of months. It’s powerful and refined – Microsoft did a great job.”
Windows 10 is designed to help with automation and workflow, making its users more efficient while bringing online new technology not available in other platforms.
The easy use and adaptability of the program is what makes Windows 10 desirable. Hendrick Motorsports employees embrace the program’s integration, using it on their tablets while at the track or in the race shops.
The application entitled OneNote by Microsoft is another tool that allows users to communicate more effectively amongst one another. Notes and data can be stored, shared and searched for within the application, enhancing communication between team members.
“We have race engineers using a touch-screen laptop with a stylus, taking hand-written notes and putting them in OneNote. Those handwritten notes are now searchable,” Hood explained. “They’re backed up to the cloud, synced and easy to share.”
Hendrick Motorsports’ teammates use OneNote to share data amongst teams and the entire campus as a whole. They are able to take an amount of data that is not consumable and incorporate a process or workflow in order to receive a greater value out of the data.
Bringing Microsoft on board as a partner has helped the organization handle the amount of data that it currently produces and extract a value out of it that it normally couldn’t get. Hendrick Motorsports is now able to come into contact with world-renowned experts within the field—a significant benefit of the partnership.
Hendrick Motorsports is looking forward to taking advantage of the new technologies and capitalizing on the relationship it has already established with Microsoft.
“We’ve got some neat projects coming down the line. A lot of them revolve around a paradigm shift in data and doing something awesome with it,” Hood said. “It’s pretty exciting.”