Fluke Networks

Fluke Corporation

Type	Corporation
Industry	Industrial Test Products
Founded	1948 in Everett, Washington, U.S.
Founder	John Fluke, Sr.
Headquarters	Everett, Washington
Key people	Wes Pringle (President) Monti Ackerman (Vice President & CFO)
Number of employees	2,525 (as of May 2016[update])
Parent	Fortive
Website	www.fluke.com

Fluke Corporation, a subsidiary of Fortive, is a manufacturer of industrial testing equipment including electronic test equipment. It was started in 1948 by John Fluke, who was a friend and roommate of David Packard, future co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, when both were employed at General Electric.

Today, Fluke Corporation is a global corporation with operations worldwide. It designs, develops, manufactures, and sells commercial electronic test and measurement instruments for scientific, service, educational, industrial, and government applications. Fluke Biomedical and Fluke Networks are sister organizations.

Fluke Corporation was founded in Washington state by John Fluke on October 7, 1953 as the John Fluke Manufacturing Company, Inc., producing electrical metering equipment.

In certain instrumentation categories, Fluke was a strong competitor to U.S instrumentation leader Hewlett-Packard, and in the category of calibration equipment, Fluke was the industry leader. By the end of the decade, the total market for test and measurement equipment had grown to $6 billion, and Fluke's share was a $150 million annually by the end of the 1970s. Industry sales continued to increase in the 1980s. Between 1975 and 1985, Fluke's sales rose at an annual average of nearly 20 percent, but with the late 1980s contraction in U.S. defense spending due to a reduction in United States-Russia tension, Fluke's sales to the government and to aerospace companies declined. The sale of Fluke's line of large bench and rack mounted equipment such as digital voltmeters and signal scanners weakened due to the increased use of PC controlled measurement and sensing modules embedded with the computer. However, in the arena of very portable hand held instruments for signal analysis and voltage measurement, Fluke was a leader. Sales in this category remained strong.

Fluke was bought by the Danaher Corporation in 1998. Danaher spun off several subsidiaries, including Fluke, in 2016 to create Fortive.

Today Fluke is a billion dollar company and its markets range from industrial and commercial facility operations to precision measurement and calibration (Fluke Calibration), data communications (Fluke Networks), to medical equipment (Fluke Biomedical). Newer contributions by Fluke to test and measurement technology in the last 10 years include thermal imaging (working with Raytek and then ISI) and remote wireless displays.