Walking the floor at CES this year felt like stepping into a future that suddenly arrived all at once. Everywhere you turned, there were robots, intelligent machines, autonomous systems, and increasingly lifelike interfaces. But unlike past years, many of these technologies no longer felt like fragile demos or research experiments.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a short series of observations from CES 2026 across three themes:

Engineering teams possess an underutilized goldmine in today’s fast-paced industrial landscape: their data. From sensor readings and vibration logs to video, sound, and test metadata, engineering data holds critical insights that can accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and safeguard operations against failure. Yet, a significant portion of engineering time is wasted merely searching for, organizing and wrangling data to make it usable.

Barry Hutt co-founder Viviota

Are You “Digital Transformation-Ready”?

So, your customers are committed to a Digital Transformation (DT) journey. How does this affect the engineering organization? Engineering executives expect integrating digital technology into all aspects of the business will deliver great value. They expect DT to fundamentally change and improve business operations. As part of the DT journey, engineering teams want to unify and update systems, organizations, and processes to support next-generation product development cycles. Their engineering tools requirements, infrastructure ,and processes will be viewed through this lens. Are your offerings ready to support your customers’ DT projects with scalable, digital enterprise-ready architecture and capabilities?

Customers turn to Viviota and to NI technology to better measure and analyze machine data from sensors. It turns out, sensor data does not always work well with traditional IT software, and there is a gap of software tools for this purpose.

This is post 2 in the series on 'The 7 Data Habits of Highly Effective Product Companies'. Tune in to our LIVE WEBINAR '7 Data Habits of Successful Product Companies' - MARCH 31, 11 a.m. CDT

My day job for the past 30 years has been helping people with their sensor data. In my time off I tinker with and build PCs, try my hand at some home improvement projects and stay on top of new technology developments through the consumption of copious amounts of online tech news website articles and YouTube videos. What I have learned—and keep being reminded of time and time again—is that there are plenty of things that I don’t know. And, that sometimes I’m not even aware of things that I don’t know. Let me explain.

National Instruments will be hosting their annual customer conference and partner showcase, NIWeek 2019, this year from May 20-23 at the Austin Convention Center. NIWeek draws engineers from across the transportation, aerospace, medical device industries and many others. There are also  a fair number of members of the academic community rounding out the crowd. It is a hub of activity for Viviota customers and partners and a busy time for our team. We were delighted to find out in January that Viviota will be presenting two of the conference technical sessions: