Dirk-Jan will present the FEI business and its major markets: Nano Research, Nano Biology, Nano Electronics and Nano Industry. He will address how different market needs introduce significant architecture challenges and how these have been tackled. One of these key challenges is handling product variability. In addition to diversity induced by market requirements, the industrial instruments as produced at FEI have a long life and support time, sometimes as long as 20 years. As PC hardware, instrument hardware, software technology and operating systems evolve: the diversity the software needs to handle can be truly impressive. FEI has a combination of strategies to be able to cope with this diversity. FEI an early-adopter of component-based development and defined a software platform strategy around 1997. This platform strategy has resulted in significant reuse over the different platforms and products and enabled substantial growth of the product portfolio. The presentation will cover do’s and don’ts with respect to defining a platform strategy. As a final topic the presentation will address the benefits of automated unit testing and system simulation testing and how it is in use at FEI.