NI: Finding a way to measure green

Green is the word if you talk to National Instruments.
“The key to green engineering is understanding the very complex issues we see around the globe,” said NI President, Chief Executive and co-founder Dr. James Truchard, sporting a green shirt during this morning’s keynote address at NIWeek08 in Austin, Texas. “The second part is fixing it. We can measure, acquire, analyze, and present and then fix it in terms of design and deploy. We can find out what the problem is and then solve it by the design process.”
“Fundamentally,” Truchard said, “we see this as an opportunity to make a difference in the work you are doing.”
“You are working at creating a new idea on how we can be more energy efficient; how we can be more environmentally sensitive reducing pollution all the way from wind mills to steel mills.”
Truchard wanted to reiterate how important the green movement is becoming.
“There is a definite emphasis on this area. It is important and you are coming up with some interesting products in the process,” he said.
This morning wasn’t all about green engineering. The company also focused on more of its key growth areas like wireless, embedded and multicore processing.
“We want to do for embedded what the PC did for the desktop,” Truchard said. “In other words we want to create a framework where software can be reused and applications can be shared in a community with ever growing momentum.”
"We seen multicore (processing) being a major step forward. We will be introducing even better capability making our analysis algorithms multicore aware so we can once again improve the efficiency of multicore as well as what LabVIEW does with a fundamental parallel approach," he said. "We see a supercomputer on every desktop. These are the next generation of computers with very powerful processing capabilities to solve the hardest problems on the planet."
NI is also making a bigger leap into the wireless market. While they have been in the area, the company is now pushing big research and development dollars into wireless.
“Wireless is everywhere and it is the biggest expense in our R&D area these days,” said Tim Dehne, NI senior vice president of R&D.
“We are introducing WiFi data acquisition products that will allow you to do your job in a better way,” Truchard said.