Alex Davern

Alex Davern, COO, CFO, and executive vice president for National Instruments, is responsible for driving alignment between the company’s customer-facing functions to quickly allocate resources to best serve our customers.

As COO, Davern helps to ensure global corporate alignment between the company’s regional teams and focused investments in key growth areas such as big physics, energy, life sciences, mobile devices, and semiconductors. With the increasing complexity of the company’s system-level business and elevated customer demands, Davern focuses on optimizing customer interactions through NI’s world-class sales and support teams, which offer expertise in all phases of production, from design to prototype and validation to deployment.

Davern also manages the supply chain from manufacturing to deployment to ensure NI products meet the highest quality standards while driving cost efficiencies. He was instrumental in opening the company’s first overseas manufacturing facility in Hungary, which delivered significant cost savings to NI and its customers. He also guided the implementation of a worldwide Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to dramatically improve processes for customer service and for tracking hundreds of thousands of sales transactions each year.

Under Davern’s leadership, NI has continually invested in and remained focused on the long-term needs of the company’s customers, suppliers, employees, and shareholders. Through the economic downturns in 2001 and 2009, NI continued to grow its R&D and customer facing investments and, as a result, quickly gained market share with new products and outstanding industry performance. Throughout the industry, Davern is a recognized expert in corporate finance and executive leadership. He was chairman of the American Electronics Association (AeA) committee on the reform of Sarbanes-Oxley 404. He also served on the board of directors for Sigma Tel Inc. and as a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Advisory Committee on Smaller Public Companies.

Prior to his career at NI, Davern worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Europe and the United States. He joined NI in 1994 as the company’s international controller, was promoted to CFO in 1997, and added responsibilities as the senior vice president of manufacturing and IT operations in 2002.

Davern holds an undergraduate degree in business studies and a postgraduate diploma in professional accounting from University College Dublin. He is a former member of the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants and the Irish Society of Chartered Accountants.