Will LXI really grow 24 percent?

On February 25, Frost & Sullivan issued a press release titled "LXI Test Market to Grow 24 Percent." You can find the text of this release on dozens, if not hundreds, of news sites (just search on the quoted headline above).

I question the conclusion put forth by Frost & Sullivan.

This release should be titled "Test equipment with LXI support to grow by 24 percent." Just because an instrument is LXI compliant doesn’t mean that the engineer using it needs the LXI support or even uses the instrument’s Ethernet port. Most LXI instruments can operate as stand-alone bench instruments that don’t need computer connectivity. Many instruments also include other communication ports such as GPIB, USB, or RS-232 and engineers could use those ports instead of LXI.

Unlike all those Web sites that just post the news, Test & Measurement World went further. I asked LXI Consortium executive director Bob Helsel if he knew how many of those new instruments might actually use the LXI capabilities. He replied "We don’t have data on that - at this point, and our private, annecdotal evidence of LXI use would make this a conservative estimate. We can ask F&S next year if there’s some way they can measure this."
Helsel also added "In my experience (~20 yrs. with test), most customers make purchase decisions on a number of factors (performance, application fit, cost, legacy instruments on hand, ease of use/development, time - system development time, TTM, TTV), and interfaces like LXI."

Helsel is right in that few engineers would make a purchase decision based solely on an instrument’s LXI compliance. Nevertheless, I still question the value in Frost & Sullivan’s report. I think it’s misleading.