Case Study: National Instruments achieves faster, standardized development and lower costs with Perforce Helix

How National Instruments Improved Their Development Process with Perforce Helix Core

National Instruments, a global test‑and‑measurement company (3,400+ employees) known for products like LabVIEW and PXI hardware, faced a fragmented development infrastructure: multiple version‑control systems (VSS, ClearCase and various open‑source tools) across six development sites and a patchwork of direct‑attached storage that couldn’t keep pace with growing data and collaboration needs. The company needed a single, cross‑platform versioning system and a consolidated, scalable storage solution.

NI standardized on Perforce Helix for its speed, flexibility and lower total cost of ownership, and paired it with clustered NetApp FAS storage. Helix was rolled out enterprise‑wide—handling source code and binary assets across many departments and averaging ~100,000 commands/day—while NetApp now handles about 90% of file serving. The result: higher performance and reliability, easy scalability, powerful branching and reduced administrative overhead (down to a single versioning admin), producing lower development costs and faster time‑to‑market.

National Instruments

Steve Lysohir

Perforce Administrator