How many LabVIEW licenses out there?

[stgagnon]

This Q isn't of a technical nature; but I'm searching for reasons for my superiors to support my effort in creating a LV solution for our device. The bean counters need to count their (potential) beans.

Does anybody have a ballpark idea about how many LabView licenses are out there? I realize this is a big number, but what order of magnitude?

I realize that universities are big users.. would you say that MOST schools use LV in some capacity?
In industry: What industries?

If you can help me with this, then I can go back to being a software weenie and take off this ill-fitted marketing hat. Then I'll start pelting you with tech Qs.

Thanks-
Suz.

[mikeporter]

Don't know exactly how many licenses exist, but it has to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Schools I don't know about. Industries? You name it. Just in terms of what I have done, there's the natural gas/oil industry, biotech, electronics, aerospace, heavy industry (iron forgings), fiber optics, telecommunications, military research.

The biggest reason though is the development and maintenance time you'll save.

Mike...

[WilliamLee]

I've been trying to find out the number of LabVIEW developers for a while.  I know the number of developers have been growing, but what is the magnitude (10 000, 100 000, 1 000 000 or 10 000 000).  I'm sure that National Instruments would love to advertise this number, especially if Labview is taking so many Visual Basic data acquisition tasks.

Will

[altenbach]

LabVIEW is everywhere! 😄

I am not sure if the total number of LabVIEW developers is public information, a better number would probably be the market share in test/measurement/instrument control, etc. software. Another number would be the count of deployed system with LabVIEW under the hood or used in development. This is probably also rapidly growing, especially counting FPGA and embedded systems.

Have a look at figures 1&2 from this article. It shows LabVIEW way ahead at 32% long ago (Q1 2004). There are probably newer numbers available somewhere.

Just wait a few years until all the particiants of FIRST enter the job market and things will really start rolling exponentially. 😄

Message Edited by altenbach on 01-28-2009 12:26 PM

[WilliamLee]

Thanks.  It's great to see some numbers and figures for comparison between the different programming languages.  Labview is pretty amazing for data acquisition and GUI design tasks.  I wonder what type of adoption Labview has in non-data acquisition tasks (such as GUI development for commercial applications).