National Instruments today was named the winner of the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Awards in the Supporting category. The awards, which recognize excellence using social technologies to interact with customers, were announced at Forrester Research’s Consumer Forum in Dallas.

“National Instruments highly values its customers, and we are honored to receive this award for building an online community that supports engineers at more than 25,000 companies globally,” said John Graff, vice president of marketing and customer operations at National Instruments. “Community is a vital part of our business, and we have used emerging Web technologies to help our users collaborate and communicate online, which reduces support costs, improves product development and identifies key customer successes.”

NI implemented a variety of online tools such as discussion forums, wikis, social networks, blogs and videos that provide a support network for customers to collaborate on engineering applications. Because no one industry represents more than 10 percent of the company’s revenue, NI uses these social technologies to connect engineers working on similar applications so they can obtain domain-specific support from their peers. Today, NI community members answer 46 percent of all questions that arise in online discussion forums.

The NI online community helps users share development techniques and software code, learn about cutting-edge technologies and connect with product experts working on similar applications. In April, NI also launched a specialized community for the 40,000 high school students that participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition, which helps students learn basic engineering concepts. This community fosters a unique support program – the NI LabVIEW virtual mentors – for which professional engineers help students with questions related to NI products and basic engineering without ever leaving their computers.

The Forrester Groundswell Awards were developed to support the principles of the book “Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies,” published by Harvard Business Press in May 2008. Written by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, “Groundswell” focuses on effective business strategies in a world transformed by social technologies and features numerous case studies. More information about the Forrester Groundswell Awards is available at www.forrester.com/Groundswell/awards.html.

Readers can explore the NI community by visiting www.ni.com/community.

About National Instruments
National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 25,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 10 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 5,000 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past nine years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

Courtesy of National Instruments