National Instruments provides software and hardware for measurement and control applications across many industries. In fact no industry is more than 10 percent of our revenue. This enables us to get a bird’s eye view of trends in customer needs and technologies that can address these needs. The trends across different industries show an ever increasing complexity of systems that need to be designed, manufactured, and tested in the shortest possible time at lowest possible cost. From the technology perspective, I would say that parallel computing using multi-core processors and FPGAs are technologies that can enable implementation of previously impossible systems in measurement and control, in many different industries ranging from consumer electronics, telecommunications, to military and aerospace. The biggest constraint on using the multi-core technology to the fullest extent has been the software. However, our company has developed the graphical programming language LabVIEW that is inherently parallel and is capable of allowing users to exploit the full abilities of multi-core easily. Our company efforts are directed at making software and hardware products that enable engineers and scientists to be more productive in tangible ways. This translates to continuing the development of the only programming environment LabVIEW that can be used to program almost any deployment platform, all the way from computers, down to MPUs and sensors. On the hardware side we continue to develop modular measurement and control platforms that make use of standard off the shelf developments like FPGAs, multicore processors etc, and make these technologies easily usable by engineers and scientists. We see our job as that of tool providers that allow professionals to concentrate on developing their domain knowledge, while we enable them to use the latest computing and electronic systemseasily. As a technology focused market driven company we work towards making it possible for local engineers and scientists to make user defined solutions to best meet their needs. In the past traditional vendors tried to lock our local engineers and scientists into vendor specific solutions that were "vendor defined”. Vendor defined systems are not capable of addressing the needs forced on us by multiple technologies converging. On the other hand flexible systems based on virtual instrumentation deliver completely user defined instrumentation. The weakness in the worldwide economy has forced engineering design, manufacturing and test teams to increase productivity, and reduce cost. The surest way to achieve this is by creating systems that are user defined as opposed to vendor defined systems. National Instruments, being the provider of open, industry standard software and hardware tools that empower users to build userdefined measurement and control systems is well poised to benefit from this drive for increasedproductivity and reduced cost. | 
