How to increase LabVIEW sales.

[Peter_B]

If NI continue not to release new Tier 1 boards (and their public silence on the matter speaks volumes on their future intentions) then LabVIEW Embedded for ARM (LVEA) will continue to become more and more obsolete.  Not only is that unfortunate for those using it or wanting to, but it will actually prevent NI from selling more LabVIEW licenses.

Assumption: I think NI has priced LVEA at a premium to avoid cannibilsing NI's cRIO/sbRIO sales.

If this is true, then what do you think of the proposed business strategy for NI:

For NI to continue/restart their R&D with LVEA, and possibly drop its price, then the resultant sales increase in the PC/Mac/Linux variant of LabVIEW [1] would more than make up for the revenue lost from cRIO/sbRIO.    I challenge NI to prove me wrong !

[1] If I thought that with my recently acquired LabVIEW skills I could eventually target a range of 3rd party embedded platforms but right now I'm not ready to use/need it for embedded programming then I am more likely to buy LabVIEW owing to the "just in case" factor. Similarly, if you knew that LabVIEW could target your smartphone with a toolkit and one day you like the idea of developing a smartphone app then this knowledge would increase the chance you would invest your $$ and time in buying and learning LabVIEW.

[Caseyw]

Mr Badcock,

Thank you for your post; we appreciate your thoughts and suggestions regarding our embedded software products and specifically the LabVIEW Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers.

Regarding your comments around Tier 1 boards as well as the software cost, while I can not discuss forward-looking product plans I can say that we will be continuously evaluating the business opportunity around supporting additional hardware targets, looking carefully at our business model, and thinking critically about how to allocate our development efforts in order to best serve our many embedded customers.

Best Regards,

Casey Weltzin

Embedded Software Marketing

National Instruments

[vitoi]

Mr Weltzin,

Great to hear from someone from NI Embedded Software Marketing. Also great to hear that additional (presumably more capable) Tier 1 boards are under consideration. It’s been a long time between drinks with the last Tier 1 board introduced over 5 years ago (if my observations are correct). My understanding is that for someone within NI with experience, creating a new Tier 1 board would take about 2 months. So, why not best serve your many embedded customers and create a new Tier 1 board now. It will take less time to develop than to discus it!

With 80% of the CPU consumed with LabVIEW programming a new more capable Tier 1 board is essential (see http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Embedded/Can-LabVIEW-Embedded-for-ARM-work-with-any-board-or-just-wi... for details). My evaluation of LabVIEW Embedded has come to the conclusion that the LabVIEW overhead makes the current Tier 1 offerings inadequate for my application. So, I can’t proceed with the current offerings. May have to reignite my C skills and see what the latest IDEs have to offer.

Your potential new embedded customer,

Vito

[Peter_B]

Hi Casey,

Thank for taking an interest in my post.  It is encouraging to be able to communicate directly with a product/marketing manager.for LVEA.

You wrote:

> we will be continuously evaluating the business opportunity around supporting additional hardware targets, looking carefully at our business model,

I can read that two ways and without knowing which way is the one you intended, unfortunately I don't have sufficient reassurance to invest $$ and time into LVEA (as much as I would like to).

One way I read it is that you are diplomatically saying NI won't be launching any more Tier 1 targets because every time you evaluate things, you believe the RIO platforms present more of a business opportunity (see my 1st post in this thread to counter that line of thinking !).

The other way I see it is that NI is genuinely intending to release more Tier 1 targets, but haven't yet found the right board(s)

Any chance you could be more explicit ?  I'm happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement !!  Without such knowledge I am very reluctant to take the plunge given the current dated Tier 1 offerings.