After a three-year hiatus, NI is back in Europe with NI Connect Munich, the most important in-person event hosted by NI. A trade fair and conference in one, the event allowed us to reunite with our #LabVIEWfriends, meet customers and potential future clients, and receive our long-awaited Center of Excellence certificate!
Munich, conveniently located in our home region of Bavaria, is only a short three-hour ride away from Würzburg, and it conveniently allows you to stop on the way to visit some of our customers in the Nürnberg area. But honestly, our #FOMO would have made us travel anywhere!
NI Connect: Day 0
Jörg arrived early on Tuesday to watch the NI Partner meeting live stream. Unfortunately, NI only allowed 50 selected partners into the rooms. There was ample discussion online with other consultants.
The initial registration took place on Tuesday evening at the ICM in the Messe area in Munich. The first few conversations made Jörg realise once again how much he’d missed in-person events and his friends from the community!
Afterwards, the German NI Consultants organised a lovely dinner at a restaurant nearby. Jörg enjoyed the company of Karsten Dallmeyer and Falk Wurster (Vikings), Christian Moritz (ZUMOLab), Jens-Uwe Peter, Michael Thimm (SEN) and last but not least, our partner manager from NI, Günther Stefan.
Back at the hotel, as usual, some midnight oil was burned working on the slides for the next day’s presentation.
NI Connect: Day 1
The next morning kicked off by having breakfast with our dear #LabVIEWfriend, James McNally.
The first proper presentation, the opening keynote, stated that data is at the core of NI’s visions, in addition to alignment, collaboration and standardisation over locations and teams. Data isn’t just a buzzword, it really is the defining resource of our age. We were delighted to hear NI specifically mention these aims, as they are equally at the heart of our own vision and mission.
“Jaguar Land Rover, Hensoldt, Electrolux, Northvolt, and ams OSRAM are improving the performance of their businesses by capturing, managing, and using the right data”
https://www.ni.com/en-us/events/niconnect/keynoteslivestream.html
As always, we of course had lots of conversations with old and new friends, customers and partners. Networking and making new acquaintances is probably our favourite part of any conference.
Meeting with some of NI’s key people to discuss future collaborations and strategy proved extremely worthwhile. Jörg also had the delight of representing the DQMH Consortium to a few DQMH users who approached him over the course of the two days.
All of this led to us putting some new, unexpected projects on the horizon for 2023. Don’t worry, we’ll definitely keep you up-to-date with all of our exciting news!
Our presentation with ZMS
Finally, it was HSE’s time to shine, with our presentation together with Thomas Herpel of ZMS (ZF Mobility Solutions). Our fantastic partnership wasn’t just confined to the desk, we continued it on the stage.
To our delight, we filled the entire room. There just weren’t enough seats for every curious attendee. As usual, afterwards, we had interesting questions and follow-up conversations.
Feel free to check out our slides at the bottom of the page!
More conversations happened towards the end of the day. Knowing so many people was often like talking to somebody, and before being able to finish a single conversation, running into the following contact and just talking for hours on end.
Center of Excellence Certificate
When HSE achieved the Center of Excellence accreditation at the end of 2019 as the first company in Germany to that date, little did we know that a global pandemic would kick in and keep us from being officially awarded the certification on the stage at NIWeek 2020 in Austin as this event had to be cancelled.
Finally, at the end of NI Connect, HSE together with other companies was officially branded as a Center of Excellence in the closing speech and was handed over the actual physical certificate by Christian Grobmüller himself (NI VP of Sales EMEA).
We are extremely proud that our customer ZMS (ZF Mobility Solutions) also achieved this certification, not least due to our help and support. Congratulations to the Test System Development (XAKT) team!!
If you’re interested in pursuing CoE with your team, please reach out. We can help with that.
To wrap things up, we spent the evening with more LabVIEW friends: Eating tasty burgers with Vikings and Konrad UK, chatting with fellow champions, more NI friends, and then other NI partners until late after midnight. These are the best kind of work dinners!
Conclusion
Verdict: Positive. In our opinion, NI Connect is not a conference anymore but a trade fair, which is ok – we have our GDevCon now to augment the event landscape with technical content and community mingling.
One day is much too short, though, to meet everybody we would have liked. A two-day event would still be warranted – and it would bring back the highly-missed evening activities. What do you say, NI?