ARC is predicting that the HMI software market is going to experience double or near double digit growth over the next two years, with growth slowing over the following three years.  The HMI software services market is expected to grow faster than the total HMI Software market over the next five years.  “The last two years have been witness to growth rates near 20%.  The corresponding effect on supplier's market shares has been equally dramatic as some of the players shuffle positions in what has become a market separated by thousands of dollars,” according to ARC Analyst Stefan Surpitski, [email protected], the principal author of ARC's “Human Machine Interface Software Worldwide Outlook”
(www.arcweb.com/res/hmi).  

“Over the last two years, HMI software has been propelled into applications that have previously been custom or proprietary,” according to ARC Research Director Craig Resnick, [email protected].  “This has caused unprecedented market growth over the last two years, and we expect the momentum to continue.”

Increased Demand for Information Drives Growth
There are numerous changes taking place in the HMI software market.  One of the key manufacturing trends is the fact that users of worldwide factory automation and enterprise computing solutions are placing a higher value on the information provided by the asset, rather than the asset itself.  Manufacturer's challenges lie with choosing what software and information platforms to adopt that will keep them globally competitive in both the short term and long term.

Asia Pacific and Latin America Offer Strongest Future Growth
ARC predicts that the Asia Pacific and Latin American markets will be the fastest growing areas of the globe for HMI software with compounded annual growth rates hovering in the low to mid teens.  Growth in the developing markets is mostly the result of greenfield installations rather than expansions of existing systems.  As China industrializes, the price of manufacturing in that economy has gone up; therefore, manufacturers are seeking to gain a better grasp of visualizing and managing the information within their manufacturing facilities.  The market for HMI software in both North America and EMEA will be growing at about half the rate of the developing regions with only a few percentage points of the overall growth resulting from greenfield installations.

Manufacturers Demand Standards Based Interoperability
An additional market driver affecting HMI software's market growth is its role in enabling plant-wide interoperability.  HMI software was one of the driving forces in creating standards-based interoperability with the formation of the OPC Foundation ten years ago, designed to help manufacturers reduce the cost of having to develop custom drivers between HMI software and devices on the plant floor, such as PLCs.  HMI software sales will grow as a result of the release of OPC Unified Architecture (UA), which is the new series of specifications for moving data and information from the plant floor to the enterprise.  OPC-UA is intended to expand the framework for moving information between HMI software and applications in the enterprise space by taking the existing OPC specifications and integrating them all together, leveraging web services as the key technology enabler in the new architecture.

ARC, Three Allied Drive, Suite 212, Dedham, MA 02026, 781-471-1000, Fax 781-471-1100, E-mail: [email protected], Web: www.arcweb.com