VDC’s IoT and Embedded Technologies team recently attended NIWeek 2015 in Austin, TX. National Instruments (NI) put on an excellent conference and we had the opportunity to take in a great deal. There were inspiring and informative keynote presentations, great partner stories, the heat, interesting panel sessions, helpful one-on-one meetings with NI executives, the strange layout of the Austin Convention Center (it allegedly has a floor 2, but I’m not buying that), demos on the exhibit floor…and, well, did I mention the heat?
The IoT / IIoT Centric Focus of NIWeek
Regardless of the format – keynote, panels, demos, 1:1’s – much of the discussion tied into the Internet of Things, or the Industrial Internet of Things in NI parlance. This focus is well justified; with all due respect to Marc Andreessen, it is time to update his famous quote. Today, “IoT is eating the world.” In fact, a majority of engineers surveyed by VDC in 2014 were already leveraging the IoT. By 2017, 81% expect to use the IoT in their projects, which represents a truly remarkable shift in the engineering world!
National Instruments’ Position within the IoT
NI’s IIoT focus, and I believe it to be the right one for the company, is to provide their customers with distributed compute intelligence that would sit between the data generating nodes and the cloud or legacy enterprise systems in the IIoT architecture.
To date, media attention has focused disproportionally on greenfield IoT applications serving the home, business, and building automation. There’s a lot of innovation to be excited about in these devices, but they represent only a slice of the total available market for the IoT. NI is aiming at this broader IoT picture that includes countless applications in all of the traditionally embedded industries, like automotive, energy, medical, industrial, and others. Deployments into these markets will be brownfield opportunities needing to traverse complex environments and interact with a host of existing devices that vary in age and capability. Moreover, any new equipment will need to connect or integrate with numerous earlier M2M systems.
At NIWeek 2015, National Instruments demonstrated that their modular, platform-based portfolio has the functional capabilities, flexibility, and strong hardware/software integration necessary to support engineering organizations as they deploy the next generation of intelligent IIoT systems. The challenge however, is for NI to broaden the mindset held by many traditional customers. Engineers will need to more often consider their platforms as appropriate for deployed systems rather than only for development and test & measurement if NI is to advance their positioning in the IIoT ecosystem.
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