 "Converged Building Solns To See Widespread Adoption")
Frost & Sullivan recently hosted its one-day 2nd Annual Building Technologies Summit at Hyatt Regency, New Delhi. The summit saw thought leaders, senior executives and key decision makers identify and analyse current and emerging issues and challenges surrounding investments in building technologies and evaluated new revenue streams in this market.
The summit explored opportunities such as new offerings in energy management, converged building solutions and remote infrastructure management, which are expected to increase the Building Technologies market potential by $3 billion by 2012.
Sanam Naglekar, senior research analyst, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia and Middle East, says, “To leverage on emerging opportunities, the building technology industry should invest in evolving technologies to cater to the changing market dynamics. The challenge, however, is getting the end users to understand these implications and treat this as an investment to ready itself for the changing paradigms.”
According to Frost & Sullivan, converged building solutions will set a new benchmark in this market and the segment is estimated to touch $20 million by 2010. The market is experiencing benefits of the first steps towards full convergence, that is, Enterprise Wide Integration. Penetration of Internet Protocol (IP) and the shift towards open protocols are enabling the adoption of converged building solutions to unfold growth.
Another cross section, which will boost this market, is energy management, which will witness an exponential growth from 2010 onwards. The EMS market will be driven by ECBC norms that will become mandatory by 2010. These norms will play a vital role in the market for energy retrofits, mini retrofits and performance contracting. Remote energy management will slowly gain prominence in case of multi-site, multi-building projects. This will lead to an increasing number of Integrated Building Management Systems (IBMS) players entering the EMS market. Audit firms, Energy Services Company’s (ESCO’s), metering companies, etc, will slowly start widening their service offerings substantiating the EMS growth.
There will be a gradual shift to remote management of comprehensive building facilities by 2010 from the current limited remote monitoring of building facilities for applications such as energy and video. As the market progresses, key focus would be on electrical, mechanical and automation services. However, a few inherent drawbacks are limiting the growth of the market. Factors such as dependency on manpower, technology, mindsets, are impacting expansion plans according to Frost & Sullivan.