API Economist: Historically, I've always thought of National Instrument as a hardware company, but you guys have been in software for a long time.

Jeff Meisel: Actually, out of the 35 years of our company history, for more than 25 of those we’ve had a heavy focus on our LabVIEW software, released in 1986.  LabVIEW is a graphical programming language which at the time was just available on the Mac, but essentially that kicked off a new era for the company. While some companies focused solely on hardware and others just focused on software, similar to what Apple does in the consumer space, the way we go about solving engineering applications is we believe there's tremendous value in delivering an integrated software and hardware approach.