Welcome to NIWeek 2013!
The annual National Instruments conference kicked off Monday in Austin, Texas with an Alliance-Member-only day including keynote and information sessions geared towards integrators. This year's keynote welcomed the largest Alliance Day attendance, 30% larger than last year.
Keynote introduced a few good things for NI partners. For one, a link to the NI Alliance Partner network website is now available on all ni.com pages. Another benefit is the growth of the LabVIEW tools network, with over 2 million downloads. A personal favorite feature of mine is an add-on from Viewpoint systems that integrates SVN source code control with the LabVIEW development project file-- good stuff for developers.
Keynote also discussed the growth of Alliance Members in emerging markets, highlighting new Alliance Members in Poland and India.
NI's president, Dr. Truchard, followed up with a discussion about the emergence and importance of cyberphysical systems, which was described as being at the core of the next industrial revolution. Conceptually, these systems cast a wider net across physical analog data and tie closer connections between the source of this data and its storage and availability on the cloud.
Alliance Day also offered some advanced technical sessions. We were able to learn some new information on use of the Actor Framework for distributed systems and in a plug-in context. We also learned more about the new Linux RT based cRIO, and opportunities to leverage existing C code on Linux with LabVIEW.
As a Vision Specialty Partner, DMC had first view of the new machine vision software and hardware. We got to see some great improvements (and cool demos), including pattern matching using an image pyramid algorithm and an object tracking feature that has a lot of potentially fun applications.
All in all, Alliance Day was a great start to the week. Stay tuned for more updates from the DMC team here in Austin.
Check out other NI Week 2013 blog posts:
New FPGA Tools from NI and Xilinx at NI Week 2013
NI Week 2013 Recap