Frost and Sullivan aptly describes the Test and Measurement (T&M) industry as follows:
Sometimes perceived as a necessary evil, the test and measurement industry plays a critical role in the delivery of product and service quality to one’s customers. Virtually every industry, including aerospace and defense, telecommunications, automotive, energy, medical, consumer electronics, semiconductors and many more, uses test and measurement equipment for designing, manufacturing, deploying and ensuring the highest level of satisfaction of customers with products and services.
In end 2013, KPMG valued the collective Test and Measurement Industry (products and services) to be over $130 billion globally. At a broad level, Test and Measurement companies cover a very wide spectrum of industry verticals, including:
and various other verticals. Over the past few years, the Test and Measurement market has seen a significant evolution in tools and products as well as aggressive product releases and acquisitions. Take for instance, the Communication and Wireless vertical. 2014 saw several acquisitions just within this one vertical including several examples of M&As, record breaking sales for key OEMs and other re-organizations (source).
HSC has been a key software solution provider to various Test & Measurement providers over the past 10+ years and has observed the following trends, irrespective of the industry vertical
Over the past 2-3 years, HSC has seen a significant interest from T&M OEMs to explore what it takes to migrate their platform from a (mostly) Linux based system today to Android. We think it makes a lot of sense. And let us explain why:
Hard to believe? We think its true. The economics of Android are hard to beat in this market.
Fair enough. We have worked with solutions (Laboratory test equipment as one example) that are either too large to move around or too specialized/real time to warrant use of Android. Have you thought of companion solutions? For example, one could use Android tablets and phones that could interface with your unit via a wireless protocol (Bluetooth, NFC, WiFi, WifiDirect, etc.) and act as a 'remote user interface' that makes it so much simpler for remote testing and your users will love it.
Well, therein lies a challege. If you are a skilled captain that can weather rough seas, by all means. If you are not, hire a captain that knows how to navigate the unexpected waves of custom Android image development. For example:
Some of the biggest gotchas are at the software level. It's one thing to 'make your current product work', its another to make sure you architect it in such a way that migrating to the next version of Android does not become a nightmare. Android today has around 10+GB of source code, and poorly documented (remember, we are not talking of SDK app development here). We have seen many cases where previous vendors have taken a hammer handed approach to Android customization. You can go ahead and change the Android middleware and make it work for most of your needs, but every time you modify middleware, remember that you are increasing the complexities of a future upgrade to a new version of Android. Instead, HSC works with OEMs to ensure that the right layer of Android is modified with minimal changes to the framework. Some of the things we do:
The Test and Measurement market is going through a lot of change and the need is for devices that perform better, are lighter to carry and are much better in UX. Android fits this bill perfectly. HSC has been customizing Android since 2006 for a large variety of industries and we believe we have a best in class R&D and software engineering team that can build a great Android T&M solution for you. In addition to just software, HSC partners with Hardware ODMs to offer you complete turnkey services for a combined software + hardware + enclosure solutions to produce white labelled tablets and devices running Android.
Do you have an upcoming project and wantus to help speed up your time to market?