Test and Measurement: Danaher spins off remaining test assets

Danaher has completed the spin-off of its test and measurement group and other businesses into a separate company called Fortive. Fortive’s first day of solo trading on the New York Stock Exchange was Tuesday, under the symbol FTV.
Danaher sold its communications business to NetScout last year in a $2.6 billion transaction that vastly increased NetScout’s size. That purchase included Tektronix Communications and some parts of Fluke Networks as well as network security company Arbor Networks.
The rest of Danaher’s test-related equipment assets have now been spun off into Fortive, including the remaining Danaher portions of brands Fluke and Tektronix. But test is only a portion of Fortive, which Danaher has called a “diversified industrial growth company” that includes professional instrumentation, industrial monitoring, Danaher’s retail and commercial petroleum platform as well as engineering. The company describes itself as focused on “field instrumentation, transportation, sensing, product realization, automation and specialty, and franchise distribution.”
In other test news this week:
• Ixia has released a version of its ControlTower network monitoring solution specifically for Cisco Nexus 3000 switches. ControlTower is used for visibility within physical, virtual and software-defined networking environments. Brent Angus, GM for networking of dimension data in Asia Pacific for Ixia, said in a statement that the integration with Cisco switches will simplify and reduce costs of data center management.
Ixia also launched a new offering this week that captures and re-creates traffic patterns from production networks. TrafficRewind is designed to provide enterprises, service providers and network equipment manufacturers faster identification of issues and outage resolution, according to Ixia. It relies on Ixia’s Vision One network visibility solution, Ixia’s BreakingPoint testing platform for replaying the traffic in a controlled “sand box” environment, and also integrates Ixia’s Application and Threat Intelligence technology.
TrafficRewind can model network behavior through dynamically changing up application types and characteristics as well as bandwidth distribution, Ixia said.
Both new offerings will be demonstrated at Cisco Live next week.
• MTS has completed its $580 million acquisition of sensor production company PCB Group. MTS plans to combine PCB into its own sensors business with an eye toward more complete test and development services for “internet of things” applications.
• Rohde & Schwarz has made some leadership changes. Manfred Fleischmann, who was president and CEO of the company for six years, has retired, and as of July 1, the company is being lead by Christian Leicher and Peter Reidel. Leicher, a member of Rohde & Schwarz’s executive board since 2005, is now president and CEO; longtime company veteran Riedel remains president and COO of the company.
• Recent research from Markets and Markets projects that the test equipment market will grow at a 6.8% compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2022, at which point it is expected to generate $35.45 billion per year.
• Semiconductor test company Advantest launched new channel cards for its V93000 platform for testing radio frequency and mixed-signal integrated circuits for wireless. Advantest said that the new cards” can handle today’s market requirements and also projected technology changes for ‘5G’ networks,” because they can simultaneously test multiple standards or multiple paths within each radio frequency device in order to reduce the overall cost of chip testing.