Giordano Automation has formed a strategic alliance with Instrumentation Engineering (IE). IE is an integrator of automatic test systems, and under our alliance, offers our software products as an integral part of their test systems. In the past, Instrumentation Engineering provided high quality, large scale custom test systems to a broad clientele of commercial and military customers. With the movement of test systems to standard, open architectures, a new business model had to be adopted which provided the appeal of open architecture, standard, reconfigurable assets, but still left room open for innovation as a key to a competitive edge.
Instrumentation Engineering's business model combines corporate partnering and advanced, innovative technologies to the integration of high quality, low cost, truly open architecture test systems. This new approach has proven successful in meeting customers' needs at low cost and with advanced technological solutions. In fact, IE's business has doubled each year since the new business model was adopted in 1993.
For IE and Giordano Automation, "Corporate Partnering" and "Virtual Corporations" are not just buzzwords, but a key element of our corporate strategies in the 90's. Many instrument and software suppliers have established partnering programs. These programs can do much to leverage other companies' resources into IE's own corporate resources. IE has established partnerships and formal alliances with major players in the test industry, including the National Instruments Alliance Program, Tektronix Synergy Partnership, HP Channel Partner, Racal Instruments Certified Systems Integrator, and the VXI Consortium's VXI Plug n' Play. Additionally, partnerships have been formed between IE and GeoTest for PC instrument solutions, and Giordano Automation for innovative software solutions.
Many ATE companies tout an open architecture test system design; but few actually achieve it. The IE test system, is a true open architecture. All components and aspects of the system design, hardware and software, can be purchased as commercial off-the-shelf elements. Each of the elements of the ATE system is basically a commodity item integrated into a system solution. The test system is truly reconfigurable by the user. Adoption of this business principle is a major leap for an ATE company whose past business was based upon an architecture that provided repeat sales and support contracts. This principle applies to test systems instrumented with VXI, VME, GPIB and PC instrumentation. The open architecture principle also applies to all aspects of system software - operating systems, instrument drivers, test execution software and test development software.
In this truly open architecture environment, IE had to provide a competitive edge, a sales strategy that would attract customers to the IE test system - something that would distinguish the IE system solution over other test system solutions, including in-house integration of standard ATE systems. Three primary strategies were applied: 1. low cost, 2. true open architecture and 3. use of Giordano Automation's Concurrent Engineering Tool Set and Diagnostician as a major software innovation.
One of the most significant innovations that provides Instrumentation Engineering with a competitive edge is the use of Giordano Automation's Concurrent Engineering Tool Set (CETS). CETS consists of a development tool and a run-time tool. The run-time tool, Diagnostician, provides automated diagnostics in the test environment, and is seamlessly integrated into IE's test systems.