The Human Machine Interface (HMI) software market, which totaled over $650 million in 2005, will reach $1 billion in 2010. According to a new ARC Advisory Group Study, it will outperform the industrial automation market, growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 9% over the next 5 years.
ARC predicts the HMI software market will have double or near double-digit growth over the next two years, with growth slowing over the following three years. The HMI software services market should grow faster than the total HMI Software market over the next five years. Over the last two years, it has had a 20% growth rate, brought about by its use in applications that were previously custom or proprietary.
An increased demand for information is also driving market growth. Worldwide factory automation and enterprise computing solutions are placing a higher value on the information provided by the software, rather than the software itself.
The fastest growing areas will be in Asia Pacific and Latin American markets, with compounded annual growth rates hovering in the low to mid-teens. The market will be slowest in North America and EMA, both growing at about half the rate of developing regions.
HMI software helped establish standards-based interoperability with the formation of the OPC foundation ten years ago. OPC Unified Architecture (UA), the new series of specifications for moving data and information from the plant floor to the enterprise, expands the framework for moving information between HMI software and applications in the enterprise space. It takes OPC specifications and integrates them with the software, using web services as the key to the new architecture, thereby increasing plant-wide interoperability. HMI software will continue to grow as OPC-UA is released.
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Filed Under: Factory automation, ENGINEERING SOFTWARE