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National Instruments Re-Releases LabVIEW 2.0

Company Expects Whole Industry of Start-ups and Venture Capital around Social LabVIEW Network

AUSTIN, Texas - April 1, 2007 - National Instruments, a global leader in virtual instrumentation, today announced the worldwide re-release of National Instruments LabVIEW 2.0, the sophomore version of the company's award-winning graphical system design platform originally released in 1990. The highly anticipated re-launch is expected to be the catalyst for growth in the technology sector by empowering user-driven content, collaboration and networking.

"NI LabVIEW has driven a revolution where engineers and scientists are able to define and build their own customer instrumentation, much in the same way that Web 2.0 is about users defining and generating their own content," said John Graff, vice president of marketing at National Instruments. "The growing buzz, and more importantly, the hype around Web 2.0 really opened our eyes at NI that perhaps we had gotten ourselves in trouble by moving too quickly to the latest version of LabVIEW, version 8.20."

In their keynote at the first Web 2.0 conference Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle summarized key principles of Web 2.0 applications as:

  • the Web as a platform
  • data as the driving force
  • network effects created by an architecture of participation
  • innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of "open source" development)
  • lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication
  • the end of the software adoption cycle ("the perpetual beta")
  • software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the long tail
  • easy to pick up by early adopters

"Upon hearing this, we were like 'Bingo! Been there, done that!'" said Tim Dehne, senior vice-president of R&D at NI. "Dr. Truchard is always wanting greater productivity from our R&D efforts, and what better way than to go through the archives and re-distribute LabVIEW 2.0?"

The Web 2.0 phenomenon has led to significant amounts of capital rushing towards start-ups and existing players that serve the new user-oriented Web. The LabVIEW platform has already built a large eco-system of partner companies that are part of the National Instruments Alliance Program as well as online communities.

"We wouldn't be surprised to see venture capitalists approach existing partner companies and other start-ups with promises that they could be the next YouTube, Flickr, or Twitter for the LabVIEW 2.0 community," added Graff.

Although the LabVIEW 2.0 code will be unchanged, the company will be providing some enhancements with LabVIEW 2.0. Specifically, instead of shipping the 25 3.5 inch floppies that LabVIEW 2.0 was originally released on, the company will distribute LabVIEW 2.0 as an online download at ni.com.

About National Instruments
National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. The company is run by people with a well-developed sense of humor who would not punish the content team for a once-per-year bit of tomfoolery - April Fools! NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 25,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 10 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 4,000 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past eight years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information from the company's investor relations department by calling (512) 683-5090, e-mailing nati@ni.com or visiting www.ni.com/nati.

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