India Is An Emerging Market For National Instruments

In an interview with Biztech2, Pete Zogas, senior VP, Sales and Marketing, National Instruments (NI) discusses NI’s India expansion plans and the emerging trends in embedded design technologies.

Could you brief us about the recent alliance formed between NI, Freescale and Wind River?

The release of the new NI cRIO-9012 high-performance, real-time controller in collaboration with Freescale Semiconductor and Wind River illustrates our ongoing strategic relationship dedicated to improving the development of embedded devices. The controller is based on Freescale MPC5200 processor built on Power Architecture technology and Wind River VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) to deliver fast performance while maintaining the ruggedness, reliability and low cost of the NI CompactRIO platform. All three companies are working together to help engineers simplify embedded system development through graphical system design, which combines open software and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) programmable hardware in a single, unifying platform to rapidly design, prototype and deploy embedded systems.

Tell us about NI’s India operations.

NI India opened in 1998 to propagate the pioneering technology of Virtual Instrumentation in the country. Since then, NI India has seen consistent growth and has introduced many new products in the test, measurement and automation market. NI India has experienced the successful adoption of the Virtual Instrumentation technology and its products.

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India is one of the fastest growing NI branches and very important for the global strategy of our company. In the last two years, NI India has doubled its revenue and headcount and introduced technologies such as USB data acquisition that make it easy for people to begin using virtual instrumentation. Given the country’s vibrant growth and development, we expect continued adoption of virtual instrumentation in India.

What is NI’s market strategy for India?

We have recently opened our first north India branch office in New Delhi. This along with the recent inauguration of an additional facility in Bangalore are indicative of NI’s commitment to giving Indian engineers and scientists all of the tools they need to be successful, with a strong focus on meeting customer training requirements. NI will continue to grow branches and development centres around the world and also in India to ensure that engineers and scientists have the tools they need to reduce development time, design higher quality products and lower design costs.

What are the other areas NI plans to explore?

Test and measurement systems are being deployed in all industry verticals. However, currently the major markets for T&M in India include Industrial Automation, Automotive, Defense and Electronics and Semiconductor. We are looking at these verticals seriously in India. While we want to continue addressing diverse markets, we also feel the need to build applications that align with certain industries.

What are the latest trends in the embedded design technologies?

Heterogeneous devices with multiple processors and FPGAs are becoming more common, resulting in design with greater complexity and longer development cycles. Traditional software development tools haven’t improved productivity at anywhere near the pace that design complexity is increasing, let alone enough to shorten the design cycle.

To help engineers move quickly through the development cycle, expressed simply as three primary stages: Design, Prototype and Deployment, National Instruments (NI) is expanding its vision of virtual instrumentation beyond the traditional areas of prototype and test into design. The productive software approach of graphical programming (LabVIEW) powerfully expands to unify most of the disparate software tools of the different development phases. Modular I/O integrated into each phase ensures better code reuse and certainty of functionality at each step. Through this vision, NI sees these tools being widely adopted by the worldwide science and engineering community.