NI president: “We are the LabVIEW company”

EE World met with Ritu Favre, who emphasized a return to the company’s product roots.

National Instruments, now NI and a part of Emerson, has a long, dominant history in test and measurement. Best known for LabVIEW graphical programming and its supporting cast of software for instrument control and data analysis, NI was founded in 1976 and for most of its existence run by founder Dr. James Truchard. Alec Davern took over in 2017 and Eric Starkloff became CEO in 2020.

Over the past several years, some of NI’s users told me that, in their opinion, the company had drifted away from its product-based business, instead moving to a business-unit focus. That is, moving more into the systems business and away from its core software and hardware products such as LabVIEW and PXI, respectively. Since the acquisition by Emerson in 2023, NI appears to be pivoting back to supporting its core products, so said Ritu Favre, President of Emerson’s Test and Measurement Business Group. I spoke with Favre on May 23, 2024, during NI Connect, the company’s annual conference in Austin, Texas.

EEWorld: Over the last several years, before Emerson took over, some in the NI community felt that the company had drifted away from them. NI had become more of a business unit organization and wasn’t focusing as much on supporting the partners who buy your equipment and integrate that equipment into bigger systems; they felt a little abandoned.

Are you intending or are you doing a shift back to those basics now? If so, how and what are your plans going forward?

Favre: I’ll start at the beginning and then I’ll answer the question. I’ve been at NI for five years. By the time I joined, the company had gone through the transformation to business units. We had Dr. Truchard then we had Alec Davern, then we had Eric Starkloff. Eric recruited me to start at NI.

I grew up in semiconductors, I grew up in business units and was very comfortable with a business unit kind of model to deliver technology to the market. A lot of what NI was, I never experienced. I was asked to run business units, and so I did. As I took over all the business units, I started to look at the top and say, “OK, I was very focused on the PXI side, and then TestStand, our aerospace, automotive, and semiconductor businesses, it was very focused.” That was where I was focused. I was, however, one part of the co company that had a lot of other parts.

When I took over seven months after the acquisition, it became very, very clear to me that we had drifted a bit and that we were very focused on systems and data and data analytics, but that our core has always been really good IO, our chassis, our LabVIEW, and, at the heart of it all, a lot of our software. I’m saying that we’re pivoting back to something that’s more imbalanced. It’s not that we’re only doing products and only doing platforms; we’re certainly also not only doing systems.

So, the way that I’m trying to at least help our employees understand we must produce a combination of products, systems and data analytics. We need to look at that in some level of balance. The way that I’m thinking about it is we’re an 80/20 hardware/software company. I’m looking at how we can achieve the goal of 70 to 75% of our work being in products, platforms, and software.

EEWorld: Do you see a revitalization of LabVIEW? Where do you see LabVIEW and the supporting ecosystem — I’m including TestStand as support for LabVIEW and a number of other products that you have — but where do you see LabVIEW going in the next several years?

Favre: We’re shifting our investment portfolio to some extent. We’ve begun to shift resources and funding to our core software product. LabVIEW is a big part of that. LabVIEW, TestStand. InstrumentStudio, flex logger, a lot of our core application software I’m pivoting funding and resourcing to those areas. Part of why you saw so much about LabVIEW in this

What I find when I visit customers is they love LabVIEW. I met a guy last night who said “My life is built around LabVIEW.” I think that’s fantastic.

EEWorld: I have described LabVIEW as a religion.

Favre: I completely agree. It has a cult-like following. It’s an incredible product that has a very, very loyal set of followers. My intention is to continue to increase that community. To your earlier point about partners and some of our ecosystem, we are going to reinvigorate that. We can’t grow the way we want without that entire ecosystem. LabVIEW is integral to that. We’re continuing to invest in putting our energy into features and feedback on LabVIEW. A lot of what we’re doing now is listening to the community. You saw Jim Kring on stage yesterday; we have some efforts to go open source to have the community help us with LabView.

For me, it’s the early days, and here’s the exact strategy, and here’s where we’re going, but I will tell you that we’re definitely investing more in our core products.

EEWorld: During the pandemic, there were a lot of supply chain issues including semiconductors, the parts that you needed to build your products. That and other factors out of your control seemed to cause price increases. Has the supply chain has settled down? Do you think that prices will stabilize or maybe even return closer to pre-COVID levels?

Favre: It’s a very interesting question. I don’t know that I would say that prices are going to return to pre-COVID level.

EEWorld: Is there any plan to try to at least stabilize prices? If not, maybe reduce prices even slightly?

Favre: We look at pricing by product somewhat by country and region. We have a good pricing team. There are places where we will reduce pricing, there are places where we will increase pricing, but it’s very market dependent and product dependent. If we make something into a solution, that’s a grouping of products, then we will have a different pricing curve.

We have one of the most broad and diverse portfolios that I have ever worked with in my career. We go from a DAQ card to an STS system. I have products that I’m selling at $500 and I have products I’m selling at $1.2 million. So, trying to do pricing along that whole thing, that’s why I made the expression. It’s a truly complicated portfolio to set prices. Pricing is somewhat of a complicated Rubik’s Cube.

EEWorld: My question comes more from the partner perspective or the people who are buying those DAQ boards, PXI cards, and so on and building, whether it’s their own systems or systems for a customer. That’s really where I was coming from.

Favre: We are looking at that closely. In that part of the portfolio, I do think there’s a lot of sensitivity, and we can increase our user base. We are looking at that part.

EEWorld: NI has always had an interest in the education market; is that continuing?

Favre: I think that commitment to the academic community had been waning, and it wasn’t like we were sitting in some room saying this is our deliberate strategy; we had a lot of different things that we were doing. Now, it has become clear to me that we must have an academic strategy. We must be in the universities; we need to be part of their curriculums.

The challenge is that the way that NI did it in the past is we had sellers that would be calling on the universities, and they would be going in and developing LabVIEW training. So, part of what we’re looking at is how we can work with our distributors and partners to help us get back into the academic space. Jesse Lyles runs our portfolio business, so he has a person on his team whose job it is to have us reinvigorate academics in a way that is affordable and sustainable but lets us get back into the university curriculum.

EEWorld: Keeping in this academic theme, are you able to get the technical talent that you need from the universities?

Favre: That is the reason that we want to be in academics. We need to raise people who understand LabVIEW and can use it.

EEWorld: I hear from your partners that getting LabVIEW programmers and trained people has been a challenge.

Favre: That’s why we do need to come up with an academic strategy. I was talking to somebody who had just been to Hungary. We have a very large facility in Debrecen. We have a thriving LabVIEW program there. LabVIEW programmers are moving into our R&D facility in Debrecan. I would say there are pockets where we’re doing some good work. I need to make that become more scalable so that we can have more LabVIEW talent out there.

EEWorld: Besides just LabVIEW talent, I mean engineering talent. Are you able to get the people that you need? And if not, what are you doing about it?

Favre: From an Austin perspective, we have a really strong brand, and people like working at NI. So, we are able to recruit. As you probably know, we have been having to streamline our cost structure going forward. We do recruit out of universities. We’ve always had a strong university recruiting program. We bring people into the AE applications engineering) program to say they kind of grow up through the AE ranks and then climb through the company.

What I’m trying to do, back to your earlier point, is get back to the basics of a lot of the good things and then augment that with system solutions and data analytics. A lot of the things that we did that I think were very strategic at the time, having that as a core, let’s go back to that and then augment on top of that.

EEWorld: You mentioned data analytics, is that something you see engineers needing more of? Some universities have started programs and degrees in data science. How does AI change that? Are people going to need more skills in data science or less?

Favre: The new currency is data. Everything is about the data, there’s more and more data. So, the thing that I would say on the data analytics piece, at least in the way that NI had been working it, is we emphasize from a messaging perspective a lot on the data analytics side. If you look at our SystemLink, Diadem, and Optimal+ products, those are all data analytics tools. But at the heart, our test equipment is gathering data, and so a lot of what you hear is this intelligent test piece; it’s all about what you do with the data.

What are you going to do? How do you get the insights, and then how do you go quicker and quicker? So, an entire demo that they showed today is all about data analytics and using AI to do what you need to do with your data. You need lots of data science, machine learning, and neural networks. A lot of that needs to be taught in the universities, and then we need to pick that sort of talent up so that we can go and apply that into our products.

I’ve always had a strong emphasis on hardware. What are the customers asking for in terms of the next-generation hardware? Be that higher data rates, power consumption, sustainability, and so on. The vectors that I see are data, just being able to move data around faster and faster. So that’s what’s going to be a big piece. The other piece that I’m seeing a lot is just power, just being able to measure more and more power. PXI has some level of limitation on how much power you can do in a particular chassis. So, then you have to gang that up.

I do think what’s happening with batteries and a lot of the sustainability kinds of trends, I do believe power is going to be the next place that we’re looking. The other big trend, of course, remains RF; we continue to see new standards evolve. So, I continue to invest in that area. I wouldn’t say that there is a brand-new test instrument that is suddenly emerging, but it is going to be a continuation of the same kinds of products that we’ve done. So, RF, we’ve had a lot of investment. We see that as a trend in the market with 5G. We’re starting to hear about 6G, and there are a lot of new Wi-Fi standards that are coming out. So that’s one big trend.

The other is power. Again, we’re starting to look at how do we create solutions that go from semiconductor all the way up through EV, and grid-charging. A lot of sustainability kinds of things. We have a lot of hardware but as you know, the heart of it all is software for us. We have 70% of our engineers remain software engineers. So, it’s how you couple it all together to keep it modular and open.

I think the other big thing we’re seeing that isn’t as much about instrumentation is the geopolitical landscape. So, as we’re starting to see more nationalization, and a lot of that’s happening as well in defense, we’re starting to see different market needs that are becoming more localized to certain regions and certain countries. That’s not a product portfolio kind of thing, but it does create new opportunities for test-and-measurement companies.

EEWorld: What is NI’s involvement right now in the wireless space, particularly in 6G? What is NI’s involvement in 6G and in Wi-Fi 8 or beyond?

Favre: The key thing in RF is it’s all about frequency and bandwidth; making sure that we have a portfolio that we call our converged instruments. We used to have to use two or three different instruments to cover the whole frequency range so we completely refreshed our RF portfolio so that we could go from basically 100 kHz up to 54 GHz in the same instrumentation. The biggest thing that we’ve been doing is increasing bandwidth and increasing frequency coverage so that we can hit the entire set of bands that are coming. As we go and talk into the market about 6G, there’s a lot of speculation about what bands are going to open up because, at the end of the day, it really is about what frequency bands they are going to be using.

EEWorld: There’s a lot of talk about what’s being called FR3. That’s sort of 6 GHz to 24 GHz, 7 GHz to 24 GHz. Of course, that’s going to involve lots of government involvement for that to take place.

Favre: For that we have the portfolio. We were ahead of that because we were watching which band was going to come out. We created higher-bandwidth instruments and higher frequency. So, we are very ready for FR 3. RF is somewhat slow right now, and that is still a hangover from COVID. What we saw is consumer electronics had a big spike and then it came down. So, we’re not seeing the RF market right now. We’re hoping that we see a return of that market, and that will end up being that 5G will come back, and then we’ll start to see some of these bands open up.

We’re optimistic about our fit. Typically, any of the cell phone cycles, as you know, usually last about 10 years. So, I think we’re going to see the 6G research is happening now. The problem I think that happened is that they had gotten so ambitious, and they were looking at these 100 GHz bands. With what was happening with millimeter wave, there was all of the research that was being done. I think physics kind of came into play and it’s very difficult to deploy networks at 54 GHz and 100 GHz. So what I’m seeing is the market and the industry is resetting to, like you said, be in the 7 GHz to 24 GHz range. I think there’s a lot of work that’s happening from a sensing communications perspective on 6G. Meanwhile, as you know, the operators need to monetize their current network. They are having a lot of challenges with the amount of investment they’ve already made, in my opinion, and there will be capacity expansions inside 5G. There are a lot of parts of the world where 5G still hasn’t rolled out. And so I think that rollout will continue, and then you’ll start to see, I think, the early parts of 6G, but we will see more expansion in 5G before we see a transition to 6G.