Technavio Research is the leader in technology research that observes a global market and can generate statistics based on their findings. They have recently looked into the impact that global industrial automation is making and watching its trends to predict what it is going to do in the future. The report they have released is called: Global Industrial Automation Market in Life Sciences Industry 2016-2020. Included under the umbrella of life sciences would be things like robots and automated processes in the medical field, pharmaceuticals, any factories that process raw materials, biomanufacturing facilities, etc.
The researchers looked at the different systems in the global industrial automation market in life sciences that generate the income for the bio-engineering branches of several companies:
- Programmable logic controllers (PLCs): which account for 753.86 million USD of the market
- Manufacturing execution systems (MES): which account for 529.2 million USD of the yearly market
- Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)
- Distributed control systems (DCS): which accounts for 1.4 billion USD of the market
Credit: Stanford University
Technavio researcher, Bharath Kanniappan warned the industry, however, that they would soon need to adopt cloud-based solutions. He said: "Cloud-based software-as-a-service is likely to become the next logical step in the evolution of automation technology in the life sciences industry. Life science companies are becoming more comfortable with the concept of service-based technology architecture. Thanks to the shift towards a more cloud-based environment, they are expected to incur immense benefits such as reduced costs, greater flexibility, and enhanced functionalities."
The compound annual growth rate, according to the researchers, will reach 5% by 2020. Thanks, in part, to the adoption of cloud-based solutions in manufacturing execution systems, distributed control systems and SCADA systems. They also estimate that the industry will be worth US$ 5 billion by 2020.
The companies that have the monopoly over the global industrial automation industry in life sciences are: ABB, Emerson Electric, Rockwell Automation, and Siemens.
Source: Business Wire
