Automation Market of National Instruments Products

National Instruments provides products and platforms that enable engineers and scientists to design any system that needs measurement and control, using the graphical system design approach. In this effort, we design products that can be applied across many different industries and application areas. In fact, no particular industry accounts for more than 15% of NI revenue.

 

Industrial automation is of course an important element of the NI business and we have a lot of customers who are using our industrial grade embedded platforms to implement advanced control and monitoring applications; ranging from automated pipeline welding machines to building control and monitoring systems for turbines.

 

National Instruments will continue to invest in products and platforms that can be applied in industrial automation applications. The core strength of the NI graphical system design platform is the combination of productive software and high-performance hardware. In the industrial area these tools are especially beneficial for developing high-performance machines and devices that require advanced sensor feedback, are characterized through challenging control tasks or have quick time to market requirements. Because those kind of advanced applications often require integration into an automation process, National Instruments products can also accomplish lower-speed process automation tasks.

 

Like the PC and smart phone, most disruptive ideas combine existing elements in a way that provide a dramatically better solution. The same phenomenon is true for the smart grid. Embedded reconfigurable instrumentation and control systems powered by NI LabVIEW software are merging with cloud-based networking, analytics and other cutting-edge information technologies. The proliferation of smart networked embedded systems, widely distributed throughout the grid, will revolutionize the way electricity is produced, consumed and distributed.

 

Many of the industry leaders in smart grid technology around the world are using NI technology for designing, prototyping and deploying the embedded systems needed to transform today’s energy networks into smart grids. The Energy Summit at NIWeek 2011 brought in some of those experts to discuss challenges and solutions around smart grid technology.   

National Instruments has some powerful technology all centered around graphical programming using the company’s LabVIEW software. NI products are great for designing, prototyping and deploying embedded systems quickly.  At NIWeek there were many demanding applications demonstrated that were made possible using the high performance capabilities delivered by NI products.

 

Creating industrial control and automation applications is easy and intuitive using LabVIEW.  The drawback is that NI hardware and software has a high price tag compared to typical industrial control and automation products. National Instruments products are like driving a fine sports car - they are responsive and high performance, but expensive.

 

NI is supporting industrial communications with the most recent being EtherCAT.

 

In demanding industrial automation and control applications, NI products make sense for industrial automation and control.

 

I have been intrigued by NI FPGA based products since they were introduced, but they have been pricey. The newest FPGA controller offering is approximately $500 list price.

 

National Instruments is not a mainstream industrial control and automation product supplier. However, NI products are being applied in very high performance niche applications.

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