Austin, TX. NIWeek is underway with the host company poised to unleash its solutions for addressing the challenges emerging from 5G, IoT, and automotive megatrends, according to Luke Schreier, vice president of marketing at National Instruments, speaking at a Monday afternoon press conference.

Every trend these days, he said, have megatrend potential, with profound implications for the engineering community. Issues include increasing complexity, compressed test times, and smaller engineering teams..

He cited an example the downside of complexity. A family member, he said, damaged a tail light on his pickup truck. What once would have cost $60 to replace a lightbulb and some plastic ended up costing $500 because of the sensors, cameras, and communications modules in the assembly. That’s just one example of the consumer-facing aspects of complexity, he said. There is today a lot more to test and an increasing demand for test equipment.

Consequently, the requirements for test equipment are changing. In a traditional closed system, Schreier said, the “vendor knows best” and provides what’s needed for a specific measurement. If a customer’s test needs change, that customer must appeal to the vendor, who may or may not provide assistance. NI research, he said, finds that 25% of test-equipment users want an API, and 47% expect their vendor to work with them to meet their custom needs.

Conversely, he said, NI supports a platform-based approach in which “the customer knows best” and can take advantage of an open, vibrant ecosystem to address the fundamentally different test requirements resulting from today’s megatrends. The products to be introduced in the following days will be in support of this open-platform approach, he said.