Vaishali Umredkar, Executive Editor, Electronics Maker got an opportunity to meet Mr. Jayaram Pillai, Regional Sales Director – IndRA, National Instruments at recently happened NIDays. In the interview Mr. Jayaram shares his insights on the benefits of NI’s open platform for engineers, innovative solutions by NI and highlight the vision of NIDays. Excerpts:
Give us a brief overview of NI’s Open Platform and how it helps in design and manufacturing?
Jayaram: In order to best serve our customers effectively, and support them for the long term, NI provides a software-defined platform for automated test and automated measurements. Software-defined is more than just software-based. Most systems and products today are software-based. The NI platform difference is that we provide software capabilities that are open and adaptable under our customer’s control. And those software capabilities are matched with equally open and adaptable modular hardware. Openness and adaptability are key to address the challenges our customers are facing today and in the future. For example, Mahindra connects databases to robotic arms. Though the robotic arms are not manufactured by us and the database is a property of Mahindra, NI’s platform can connect the arms and the databases. This showcases the ability of the open platform to be brand and technology agnostic in order to deal with complexities.
How do you validate NI’s position as an industry leader in the productivity of T&M solutions?
Jayaram: The demands placed on engineers and the tools they use to do their jobs continue to rise, with accuracy and testing speed being key factors for consideration. The broadening of technology-related products as well as increasing specialization puts a whole new level of requirements on engineers whose job it is to design, prototype, and test new capabilities. Given these conditions, it’s becoming increasingly clear that an agile, platform style approach is necessary in order to deliver a set of tools that can enable a faster time to market, while at the same time building on a common core of well-established features and functions. Our open platform-based solution enables the creation of more specialized, targeted offerings that package together the specific capabilities needed by different segments of the market. We provide our customers with high-level software that enables them to begin their testing much further down the timeline than other industry offerings.
Tell us about NI’s growth in recent years.
Jayaram: NI India’s growth and increased investment in India is a testament to the importance of the Indian market. With many industry majors and global companies investing in setting up engineering centers across India, and with the renewed emphasis on ‘Make-in-India’, NI expects continued adoption of the company’s platforms in India. Automated Test & Measurement systems and specifically NI’s products are being deployed across a variety of industries. However, currently the major markets for T&M in India include Automotive, Aerospace & Defense, Electronics and Semiconductor, Research and Wireless.
Do you have any programs for engineers in India? What has their participation been like?
Jayaram: Yes, we are collaborating with colleges, academics and centers of excellence. We have set up Centers of Excellence across India in various institutes where we try to educate current engineering students who are going to be utilizing these technologies tomorrow. We give them access to all these technologies so that they can train themselves and gain a hands-on understanding of industry functions rather than utilizing only academic tools for theoretical knowledge. The same LabVIEW platform which has been used by a company like Cypress for semiconductor validation is the tool that a student would use with this tiny breadboard and circuit. As they work in their professional career, they would already have an in-depth understanding of how these systems work because they would have worked with them during their Engineering course. These are the very things that we are driving through our collaborations with various academies/institutes.
What is your outlook for the future?
Jayaram: Technology is moving at an unprecedented pace and our customer’s world is still one of increasingly complex products and converging technologies. These trends are happening across all industries, in semiconductor chips, connected cars, in smartphones, and in advanced research such as 5G. More and more of the functionality of these technologies is being defined in software; therefore, their capabilities are rapidly changing. Engineers who are designing and testing these systems are struggling to create measurement and test systems that can improve at the rate of these technologies, in a shorter time and with smaller teams. And it’s not about just keeping up but the ability to take advantage of these trends in a way that enables them to get their jobs done faster and more efficiently.
Systems today are becoming more complex to both design and operate. It requires a simple solution to deal with the complexity and the approach that we have chosen is to use the open platform-based solutions that we believe simplify the process to a large extent. These systems can now be realized, products and processes tested and then sent to the market, which is the most important focus area. Software defined automated test realized using such an open platform is the trend that we foresee for the market.
How does NIDays help customers and what is the vision of the event?
Jayaram: NIDays is the localized version of NIWeek- the week-long annual event that we do on a much larger scale in Austin. In 2019, we are excited to be offering a pan-regional event called NIDays-Asia that will take place in Shanghai. We present the same content at NIDays to demonstrate the best in class products that are available in the test space on a national scale. I believe that there are about a thousand people participating in the event. This creates a shared space that includes scientists, academicians, and the media as well. This is a great platform for networking and to building relationships. Many times, individuals come here with a problem, and find solutions to it after talking to our staff and our customers. NIDays also offers a great platform for the test and measurement community to share their ideas with us and use the live demonstrations that are performed here to display solutions to current complex problems.
