Trends such as the Industrial Internet of Things, 5G, and vehicle electrification, along with existing realities like maintaining legacy and distributed systems, are inspiring companies to seek new approaches to systems management. The drive toward centrally connected and coordinated systems has transformed theories and pilot projects into large-scale, distributed implementations with impactful business performance. Companies are reaping these benefits from actionable, data-driven insights that help them maximize uptime, increase efficiency, and drive future product innovation. At the same time, companies need to balance the adoption of new connected technologies with preserving support for valuable legacy equipment with long lifecycles.
Systems that manage, maintain, and extract information from small-scale pilots or groups of systems are relatively simple to implement. However, the focus shifts to the next challenge: scaling and managing large deployments across varying lifecycle stages, distributed testers, and nodes in entire plants and factories. This challenge includes tasks such as remote software and system configuration, data management, and performance monitoring, and applies to industries such as aerospace and defense, transportation, and manufacturing.
SystemLink enables engineers to connect, deploy, and manage NI and third-party distributed systems through a centralized interface accessible from anywhere. This allows them to remotely configure and deploy software, monitor equipment status and performance, manage alarms, and visualize application parameters. Furthermore, engineers can automate data communication with customer-defined dashboards and remote operator interfaces.
To meet demands such as testing more complex DUTs in shorter timeframes, engineers need tools that adapt to their needs and can be used efficiently in their workflow, helping them meet the specific requirements of their application. SystemLink is the latest addition to NI's software-centric platform, which has products designed for the needs at different stages of your workflow—products that have been adopted in full or in part by more than 300,000 active users. With LabVIEW engineering systems development software at its core and TestStand test management software handling execution, this workflow helps improve the productivity of test and validation labs across many industries. Each piece of the workflow is also interoperable with third-party software to maximize code/IP reuse and leverages the LabVIEW Tools Network ecosystem of plugins and tools for more application-specific requirements.
