A Conversation with Rudy Sengupta on vision, strategy and innovation

The Edge: Hi Rudy, it’s great to have you here with us. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Today we want to talk about software.?

Software has always been a big part of NI. Can you talk about the importance of software’s role in NI’s broader test and measurement strategy??

Rudy Sengupta: Thank you for having me. I always enjoy sharing the great things we are working on. As you know, for 40-plus years, software has been a core differentiator for NI. We've always approached our overall solutions in a way that’s designed to solve complex challenges for engineers and scientists. But engineers and scientists need to move from the theoretical world to taking real-world measurements and doing real-world testing. The overall strategy for NI’s core ecosystem of differentiated software is to enable customers to move from thinking about solving a problem to acquiring real-world measurements to utilizing the insights from that measurement. Our software becomes the API through which they interact with all their tools and what allows them really to make that move.

TE: As most of our readers probably know, LabVIEW has been a cornerstone of NI’s software strategy, and NI has recently made a recommitment to the platform. As NI looks to the future of test and measurement, what innovative software solutions or projects are you excited about?? And why??

RS: LabVIEW continues to be the de facto standard for test and measurement.? But we’ve evolved as a company to think about more complex systems and go beyond just tools and products, bits and pieces, to offering overall solutions for the customer.

What excites me going forward with this recommitment to the platform is thinking about it from the customer’s viewpoint —"I want to understand how this simulation is going to perform in the real world. I've got real hardware I want to test. I want to analyze that data.” ?This goes beyond a singular-product, singular-feature-level approach. We're taking a more holistic view of our customers’ job, gaining deep intimacy into their challenges and pressures so we can tailor a more comprehensive software solution, starting from the earliest design phase. Re-honing and reinvesting in LabVIEW let us make sure customers have the right tools to solve their unique challenges.

On customer-centric solutions??

TE: With the evolving challenges that today’s test engineers/leaders are facing, could you explain how NI's current and future software strategies are being designed with day-to-day challenges in mind???

RS: We're seeing more and more of our customers under tremendous pressure as the products and technologies they and their vendors are working with become more complex. Plus, they’re facing much greater pressures in their overall design cycles. So, they've got less time, less money, and more complexity to deal with. Our charter must be to enable engineers and scientists to effectively do their job faster and within the concept of a workflow—okay, you've done the test, you've got terabytes of data, how do you draw insights faster? It's about connecting that workflow, while dealing with these new customer constraints, like moving from building DIY frameworks from the ground up to graphical programming languages. LabVIEW was a pioneer in enabling customers to accelerate their workflow, and now we’re seeing it level up even further.

TE: Software is your team’s focus. What do you think customers should know about NI’s approach to test and measurement software??

RS: I might be a bit biased, but I truly believe our software portfolio presents the best options for test engineers. We take a connected approach to hardware and software. This gives engineers incredible access to IP, data, and tools across their entire operation. But another big differentiator has been the openness of our platform. Not only can you leverage our hardware, but we work with a lot of vendor IP and third parties, which allows for a more customer-centric solution. The openness of NI’s hardware/software portfolio is critical because our customers need it to be open — their solutions often involve multiple programming languages, hardware, and software from multiple vendors, inherited code, etc. The higher-level starting points of our software enable a quicker development environment, and when you pair that with our hardware, it means faster times to first measurement, first analysis, and first insight. The result is higher productivity.

On addressing business concerns?

TE: In a competitive market where cost, time to market, and maintaining a competitive edge are paramount, how does NI's software strategy support businesses in addressing these critical factors??

RS:? Once again, it all starts with this customer-centric approach. Let's assume a customer has no NI hardware or software, but they've got challenges and they’re looking for tools. We don’t approach it like it’s a blank slate where they can just start fresh, because they need to solve their problems while making the most of their legacy solutions. Having an open ecosystem lets us meet them where they are.

But at the end of the day, it still comes down to time-to-market pressures.

How do I perform this test fast with the most efficient, quality solution?

A shift we've made over the last couple of years goes beyond just providing good test capabilities to providing analytic capabilities that enable you to efficiently extract data insights. It’s our investments in data management, AI, and ML-based algorithms that allow you to harness insights from all that data and infuse intelligence and speed throughout your workflow. So, it’s not just that you can do your test fast, but you can be confident the product you’re shipping is the highest quality.

TE: Anything else you think it’s important to mention?

RS: As I think about customer problems today, we’re obviously in lockstep with them in terms of accelerating their workflow and enabling them to release higher-quality products. And we're also thinking about how to do that with the next generation of technology investments that we're making with AI and ML. That said, we’ve heard and we’re acting on the feedback that we need to maintain and grow our investment in the core platforms our customers use every day, because the quality of their product relies upon the quality of the NI software they’re using to test that product.