Remote - Spring 2015 - (Page 30)

Industry News Number of Smart Homes in Europe and North America Reached 10.6 million in 2014 According to a new research report from Berg Insight, the number smart homes in Europe and North America reached 10.6 million in 2014. The North American market recorded a 70 percent year-on-year growth in the installed base of smart homes to 7.9 million at the end of the year. This corresponds to 6.0 percent of the households in the region and places North America as the most advanced smart home market in the world. The strong market growth is expected to last for years to come, driving the number of smart homes in North America to 38.2 million by 2019, which corresponds to 28 percent of all households. The European market is 2-3 years behind North America in terms of penetration and market maturity. At the end of 2014, there were 2.7 million smart homes in Europe and the market is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 61 percent in the next five years to reach 29.7 million smart homes by 2019, which corresponds to 13 percent of all European households. The most successful products on the smart home market include smart thermostats, security systems, smart light bulbs, network cameras and multiroom audio systems from vendors such as Nest, Ecobee, eQ-3, ADT, Vivint, Philips, LIFX, D-Link and Sonos. Point solutions of this type (products that have been designed for one specific functionality) outsold the more comprehensive whole-home systems by a factor of six to one in 2014 and stood for 59 percent of the total smart homes revenues in Europe and North America. Point solutions have previously been lacking interoperability and customers that were looking for more comprehensive home automation have had to choose a whole home system from the start. "Several new initiatives such as Apple's HomeKit, AllSeen Alliance's AllJoyn, Works with Nest and IFTTT will change this so that users now instead can start with a point solution and later expand into a whole-home system simply by adding compatible products" said Lars Kurkinen, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight. This new trend is anticipated to allow a larger number of people to experience the benefits of whole-home systems at an earlier stage, which will catalyse the development of the whole market. B&B Electronics Emerges as Global Intelligent IoT/M2M Expert B+B SmartWorx Thirty-four-year-old networking expert B&B Electronics emerged as B+B SmartWorx. While continuing the tradition of developing mission-critical network connectivity technology for remote or demanding environments, B+B SmartWorx is ramping up the intelligence in that connectivity piece, embedding intelligence throughout the network connectivity stack, from edge device to network backbone. B+B's latest technologies have led the company to this new position in the Internet of Things (IoT) industry and the decision to change its name. Those technologies - the Wzzard Intelligent Sensing Platform for creating wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where customer applications and logic reside at the network edge, and its SWARM intelligence-based cellular edge gateway devices - combine to form the B+B SmartWorx IoT Edge Processing Architecture. Engineered for environments where existing equipment and networks are too valuable to ignore or replace, B+B's edge processing architecture adds new layers of functionality, efficiency, productivity and scalability to existing M2M data networks, allowing integrators and VARS to evolve their customers' existing networks into more autonomous and decisive IoT systems. "IoT technologies have inserted more intelligence, and complexity, into the M2M conversation," said Jerry O'Gorman, CEO of B+B SmartWorx. "While companies desire the improved data analytics the IoT brings, many are stopping short of adoption due to the complexity of integrating existing assets into the IoT vision. For several years B+B has been engineering solutions to bring existing equipment into the IoT conversation, and hence transitioning from connectivity technology to technology for connected intelligence, so the old B&B Electronics image didn't fit us anymore." O'Gorman points to the 2012 acquisition of Czech Republic-based Conel and its industrial cellular gateways as the spark for the company's intensive development to enable IoT solutions. "The Conel acquisition gave us an immediate pedigree within Europe, and our new technologies build upon this 30 www.RemoteMagazine.com trusted base. With the integration process complete it seems right to combine our identity into a single brand, bringing together the best of what has been achieved in Europe and the US over the past decades, and signaling our strategic direction for the future." The new focus on the intelligence in the connectivity piece has also led B+B to invest in software engineering expertise at all of its global locations, including a new team in Galway, Ireland. Historically, B+B averaged one or two software engineers for every hardware engineer; today it's six or eight to one. Ethernet Components Market Forecast to Continue To Grow The world market for industrial Ethernet infrastructure components was estimated to be worth nearly $1.38 billion in 2013 and grew by 7.1 percent to reach $1.48 billion in 2014, according to a report published by IHS. The research for the report was carried out during 2014 and was based on data supplied by international manufacturers and suppliers of the principal products used to construct industrial Ethernet networks. The average revenue growth is believed to have been greater than for factory automation in general, but manufacturers interviewed for the study reported considerable variation in their sales revenues in both 2013 and 2014. This reflects how the market is highly influenced by individual projects, particularly in process industries where fluctuations in the capital expenditure that drives them can be severe, as they react to economic and political events. IHS concluded that world revenues for the principal products analysed in the reports, which include gateways, switches, routers, wireless access points and connectors, will continue to grow at around an 8.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2013 to 2018. The report offers a number of observations and predictions in addition to the usual detailed statistical detail and forecasts. The market for Ethernet gateways will grow more slowly with the introduction of newer versions of factory automation devices that have built-in Ethernet connectivity. Routers designed for factory-floor use will be replaced by Layer-3 switches, which incorporate routing capability. Lastly, the market in Asia will continue to grow faster than the ones in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) or the Americas for the foreseeable future. However, the difference is quickly narrowing as the runaway growth of China's industry, seen in recent years, slows to a more sustainable pace. IHS does make one perhaps controversial prediction: the ultimate demise of the unmanaged switch, which may be superseded by a new breed of low-cost, low-functionality layer-2 switch. The rationale offered is that the market price difference between the two products will tend to zero and render the unmanaged switch pointless in much the same way as the industrial Ethernet hub has become extinct. Only time will tell. VC Funding in Smart Grid Totals $383 Million in 2014 Mercom Capital Group, llc, has released its report on funding and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity for the smart grid sector for 2014. Venture capital (VC) funding into smart grid technology companies was $383 million in 73 deals in 2014, compared to $410 million in 64 deals in 2013. Total corporate funding, including debt and public market financings, came to $844 million in 2014, compared to $584 million in 2013. There were 88 total VC investors in 2014, with eight active investors participating in multiple deals. Home automation companies received the most funding within Smart Grid. The Top VC funded companies in 2014 were led by Savant Systems, which raised $90 million. Zonoff brought in $31.8 million; this was followed by the $22.6 million raise by ChargePoint. SIGFOX raised $20.6 million and EnVerv, raised $15.4 million. The top VC investors in 2014 included BDC Capital, Constellation Technology Ventures, Emertec Gestion, Israel Cleantech Ventures, Qualcomm, Siemens Venture Capital, VantagePoint Capital and Voyager Capital with two deals each. There were 32 Smart Grid M&A transactions (12 disclosed) in 2014 totaling $3.9 billion. The top disclosed transaction in 2014 was Google's acquisition of Nest Labs for $3.2 billion, followed by the $200 million http://www.RemoteMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Remote - Spring 2015

Editor's Choice
The Impact of OPC UA and Information Modeling on Monitoring Solutions
Protecting Critical Infrastructure: Understanding the Threat to SCADA Networks
Small Power, Big Benefits – Fuel Cells for Remote and Off-Grid Applications
What to Expect in the Equipment Industry in 2015
Wireless Well Pad Retrofit
IT-OT Convergence: The Importance of Aligning Historically Disparate Technologies
Internet of Things North Americs Preview
SCADA
Networking
Security
Onsite Power
Industry News

Remote - Spring 2015