National Instruments reported record numbers for the quarter and full year. Revenues for the fourth quarter were $367 million, up 2% year-over-year, and a quarterly record, according to the company. NI CEO Alex Davern said that he was proud of the company’s “ability to grow in a tough industrial economy with record quarterly revenue. I believe this is a reflection of our realignment, execution to our strategy and commitment to operational excellence.”
Net income was $59 million for the fourth quarter of 2019 and $162 million for the full year, up 5% from the prior year. Full-year revenues were flat at $1.35 billion.
Geographically, revenue in the Americas was down 1% in the quarter, up 18% in Asia-Pacific and down 7% in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa. NI said that orders for the quarter were up 9% year-over-year, and that orders greater than $20,000 saw particularly strong growth of 19%.
NI is in the midst of a leadership transition from Davern to a new CEO, Eric Starkloff, who currently serves as NI president and COO. STarkloff will officially take the helm as of tomorrow, February 1, at which point he will also join the board of directors as president and CEO.
The company also this week announced that Gayla J. Delly, former CEO of Benchmark Electronics and a current board member for Broadcom and FLowserve, will join the NI board of directors as of March 1, 2020.
In other test news:
–Netscout Systems reported growing revenues during the most recent quarter, at $260 million compared with $246 million in the year-ago quarter. Product revenue was about 55% of total revenue, and service revenue accounted for about 45% of revenues. The company recorded $36.7 million in profits for the qaurter, compared to a net loss of $3.6 million in the same period last year.
“We delivered strong third-quarter results with both revenue and earnings per share performance exceeding the high-end of our expectations,” said Anil Singhal, Netscout’s president and CEO. “Our performance included solid revenue growth in both our service provider and enterprise verticals. We also continued to see strong adoption of our software solutions, which contributed to higher profitability and strong earnings per share performance in the quarter.”
-Keysight Technologies says that early 5G engagements with all four national U.S. mobile network operators have resulte din more than 600 validated test cases which use its 5G network emulation solutions and are “critical to the operators’ respective 5G device acceptance plans.”
“Our close collaborations across the mobile industry has enabled us to fully support major mobile operators’ deployments of 5G services that rely on high-end devices,” said Kailash Narayanan, VP and GM of Keysight’s wireless test group.
In other company news, Keysight this week launched a new Propsim channel emulation offering focused on satellite-based communications, with features including enhanced fading capabilities that enables advanced performance validation of communication links between radios, radios and satellites, as well as between satellites, according to the company.
–Anritsu says it has launched the industry’s first vector network analyzer capable of measurements from 70 kHz to 220 GHz in a single sweep. The new VectorStar ME7838G broadband VNA allows engineers to “measure a wide range of circuits on the same wafer without transferring from a coax microwave VNA to coax mmWave VNA or waveguide mmWave VNA,” Anritsu said, adding that “the system reduces measurement time of the entire wafer, improves measurement accuracy of wideband devices by eliminating the need for waveguide concatenation, and delivers wafer probe station cost efficiencies by reducing the number of VNA reconfigurations.”
–Rohde & Schwarz is extending a promotion for its value line of instruments through June 30, 2020, which is the end of its financial fiscal year, . The promotion was available for pre-configured oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, power supplies and power analyzers, and R&S has also added handheld spectrum analyzers, a signal generator and its mid-range oscilloscope.
–Bureau Veritas says that it plans to hire around 12,000 permanent employees around the world during 2020, with the bulk of the hiring in the Asia-Pacific region. Around 8,000 people will be hired in APAC, another 2,000 in the Americas (including 900 in the United States), 2,000 in Europe and around 550 people in Africa. The company also announced this week that it has appointed Ron Stupi as SVP and COO of its building and infrastructure team, which is part of its Commodities, Infrastructure, and Facilities (CIF) division in North America.
-Network and service assurance company Netrounds said this week that it was part of a “zero touch provisioning and testing” proof-of-concept demonstration with Itential, focused on network automation for complex network environments. The PoC leveraged Itential’s network automation platform and Netrounds’ active testing and monitoring capabilities.
“The ability to measure network performance from the customer perspective before the service is handed over to the customer ensures that there are less support tickets and returning calls. This drastically reduces operational costs and increases customer satisfaction,” said Anders Bergsten, VP of product management at Netrounds. “A key enabler for this is our lightweight test agents, which measure across network layers, from the edge to the clouds. In our partnership with Itential, our automation capabilities are used across the full service life cycle to safeguard the customer experience.”
–Teledyne Technologies recently highlighted its support for the new Compute Express Link (CXL) protocol on its Summit PCI Express protocol analyzers.
“The CXL protocol is anticipated to set the lead for high-performance accelerator interconnect,” said Jim Pappas, director of technology initiatives at Intel. “Test and IP solutions from companies including Teledyne LeCroy and Synopsys show the robust growth of the CXL ecosystem and help enable a smooth transition and rapid industry adoption.”
