NI Connect 2024, May 20 - 22

Engineering is the art of organizing and directing people and controlling the forces and materials of nature for the benefit of humanity.

-Henry G. Scott

NI Connect 2024 Day 1 opening keynote started with above shown statement which set a stage for the rest of NI connect. You can watch the opening keynote here, it was fully focused on NI core technology values and key customer case studies. It was encouraging and energizing to see that a new leadership represented by Ritu a president of NI Test and Measurement business with Emerson going back to all the way to 50 years ago to when Doctor T started a company with a vision of automated test and measurement. 

 There were a few important announcements for future investments in LabVIEW + and NI PXIe HW portfolio which is a new motion in comparison for the last few years. LabVIEW is getting reprioritized, and more investments will be made in LV and LV community (check out the first day keynote for more details). List of new PXIe module will come to market this year – PXIe High power SMU 4051/4151, 3rd generation VST, new PXIe controllers on 11th generation intel processor, new USRP. 

With this new product investment NI is continuing to heavily focus on Data and AI. NI announced collaborating with Microsoft around Generative AI. Watch the second day keynote for more details. 

Besides the first two days there was a partner day on May 20th which was more face-to-face meetings and close door session with partner and customers. Also, there were several Leadership forums. 

Next year, NI Connect will move to another location due to the reconstruction of Austin downtown convention center.  They will move to the Dallas Fort Worth area. No details yet when they will bring back NI Connect to Austin.

Right after Keynotes on May 21-22 days was full of technical sessions and demonstrations in experience lounge. I also had a technical session right after the first day keynote on a new offering that we developed in Yerevan for ADG facility health monitoring, we had a packed room with customers and NI people. Also, I had a dedicated demo booth in ADG area which gained significant level of attention from customers and NI various teams. 

You can see above public map of the NI connect experience lounge area which has a very symbolic arrangements, in the center you have all Software products, around the circle you have various industries or business units, the inner circle serves the BU’s or industries, and they are all interconnected.  The core idea is to focus on NI core technologies in solutions that are made using various products from each BU to illuminate the siloes and the core to that is a Software, and Product Analytics (PA) software is one of the top contributors for NI business in any domain. PA portfolio has a use case for each industry and that’s where our new offering developed by NI Yerevan PA team is focused on.

 I received countless number of complements both from NI and Customer on the DEMO that I presented during NI connect. Demo encapsulated the synergetic relationship of NI various products that we used in solution, it very well resonated with this year’s vision on having SW in the center and our demo showed it in real, as usual we end upped being one step further then others that captured tone of attention. Lots of people been directed to come and check out our demo, NI SW R&D people particularly are looking to productize some of the plugins that we developed for offering. 

You can see below my demo booth, which has a motor bench on the table to showcase the actual data aggregation and on one of the monitors you can see the drill down dashboard which shows all our connected assets globally, and from there you drill down to other pages.  Pretty much all customers have been impressed with the scale of this demo as it wasn’t just a demo, it’s a working solution that still works as it is monitoring this globally dispersed assets.

We have around 8 real assets connected globally, 5 of them are in Yerevan. What you see below is our landing page for global health monitoring on distributed assets. This solution has around 10 various pages for monitoring the connected assets. We have been able to install sensors on Yerevan EC MFG machines and even now this solution is monitoring the systems and aggregating data from Yerevan and Wisconsin. 

Data is being processed upon acquisition on the edge. We are using various traditional signal processing methods but most notably we are using ML to detect abnormal trends on the edge. Overall, the demo was great, and customers were impressed. Solution sits on the top of NI SystemLink and uses NI FlexLogger for data acquisition.

I was not alone on the demo floor, Avag Tsaturyan and Armen Kirakosyan also had demos. It was great to see and spend some time with Avag and Armen. Avag was representing M3 systems NI partner company from EU with large scale demo and Armen from NI Austin was showcasing a new solution on NI STS system.

We also managed to spend some time with our Armenian friends in Austin and agreed to meet in Yerevan this summer.

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