Keysight. Keysight Technologies, Inc. is an American company that manufactures electronics test and measurement equipment and software. The name is a blend of key and insight. The company was formed as a spin-off of Agilent Technologies, which inherited and rebranded the test and measurement product lines developed and produced from the late 1960s to the turn of the millennium by Hewlett-Packard's Test & Measurement division.

Products
Keysight's products include hardware and software for benchtop, modular, and field instruments. Instruments include oscilloscopes, multimeters, logic analyzers, signal generators, spectrum analyzers, vector network analyzers, atomic force microscopes (AFM), automated optical inspection, automated X-ray inspection (5DX), in-circuit testers, power supplies, tunable lasers, optical power meters, wavelength-meters, electro-optic converters, optical modulation analyzers and handheld tools. In addition, it produces electronic design automation (EDA) software (PathWave Design division). It mainly serves the telecommunications, aerospace/defense, industrial, computer, and semiconductor industries.

History

Acquisitions
Keysight acquired British electronic measurement instrument maker Anite in 2015 for £388 million ($607 million). In 2017, Keysight acquired data technology company Ixia for about $1.6 billion in cash. The company acquired British software testing company Eggplant Software from The Carlyle Group for $330 million in 2020. In 2023, the company acquired France-based ESI Group for approximately $1 billion. In 2024, Keysight outbid Viavi Solutions to acquire British telecommunications testing company Spirent for $1.5 billion.

Controversies
The 2017 Tubbs wildfire incinerated two buildings on the headquarters campus of Keysight in the Fountain Grove neighborhood of Santa Rosa, causing the complete loss of historical archives of Hewlett-Packard (consisting of over 100 boxes of documents from William Hewlett and David Packard, who had founded the company in Silicon Valley in 1938). A former HP employee who had previously been in charge of the archives commented that "a huge piece of American business history is gone", and Keysight disputed criticism that the archives (which it had acquired at the time of its founding in 2014) had been inadequately protected.

In 2021, the United States Department of State fined Keysight $6.6 million for unauthorized sales of defense-related software to China, Russia, and 15 other countries from 2015 to 2018, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. According to the State Department, some of the sales posed a risk to national security, and the company had been notified of potential unauthorized data transactions in 2017. Keysight agreed to pay the fine and to hire a compliance officer to conduct future audits.

Research and development 
From its launch in 2014 until 2020, Keysight increased its investment in R&D from approximately 12% to 16%, a percentage increase that represented almost a doubling of the investment in absolute dollars.

Awards
Keysight won the 2014 Global Frost & Sullivan award for market leadership with $300 million in instrumentation software revenue. The citation states R&D investment of 12% of revenue ($365 million in 2013) as an important factor.

In recent years, Keysight received a ranking of #46 on Forbes list of “American’s Best Midsize Companies.”

Keysight was recently ranked #46 on Fortune's 2022 100 Best Companies to Work for.

References

External links
 

 Top 12 public test and measurement companies by revenue
 New Keysight CEO kicks electronic measurement company into overdrive 

Electronics companies established in 2014
American companies established in 2014
Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Electronic test equipment manufacturers
Electronics companies of the United States
Hewlett-Packard
Instrument-making corporations
Corporate spin-offs
Power supply manufacturers
Manufacturing companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Companies based in Santa Rosa, California