The primary purpose of the IVI Foundation is to promote the development and adoption of standards for programming test instruments. In doing so, the Foundation focuses on the needs of people that build and maintain high performance test systems with off-the-shelf instrument drivers. The IVI Foundation builds on existing industry standards to create specifications that simplify interchanging instruments and provide better performance and simplified maintenance.

The IVI standards define an open driver architecture, a set of instrument classes, and shared software components. Together these provide critical elements needed for instrument interchangeability.

IVI offers several benefits to measurement system designers:

• IVI's defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) standardize common measurement functions reducing the time needed to learn a new IVI instrument.
• Instrument simulation allows developers to run code without an instrument. This feature reduces the need for sometimes scarce measurement hardware hardware resources and it can simplify testing of measurement applications.
• IVI drivers feature enhanced ease of use in popular Application Development Environments. IVI's standard APIs, combined with IVI driver wrappers where appropriate, provide fast, intuitive access to driver functions.
• IVI drivers provide for interchangeability. Interchangeability reduces the time and effort needed to integrate measurement devices into new or existing systems

Systems designed with IVI drivers enjoy the benefits of standardized code that can be interchanged into other systems. This code also supports interchange of measurement devices -- helping to prevent hardware obsolescence. Interchangeability is supported on three levels: The IVI architecture specifications allow architectural interchangeability -- that is a standard driver architecture that can be reused. The class specifications provide syntactic interchangeability which supports instrument exchange with minimal code changes. The highest level of interchangeability is achieved by using the IVI signal specifications.