Enterprise integration enhances need for BAS

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 3, 2005

The worldwide building automation systems market continues to grow at a steady rate in both developing and developed countries, according to a new report.

The worldwide building automation systems (BAS) market continues to grow at a steady rate in both developing and developed countries.

The worldwide market for BAS is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 5% over the next five years.

The market was nearly $22 billion in 2004 and is forecasted to exceed $25 billion in 2009, according to a new ARC Advisory Group study.

Corporations in developed countries continue investing in BAS solutions to help strategically manage existing building assets while companies in developing countries continue constructing new state-of-the-art commercial and industrial buildings.

"For companies in developed regions, strategic management of existing building assets is one of the best ways to increase productivity, with little to virtually no operational upsets".

"On the flip side, corporations in Asia continue expanding operations to meet growing domestic demand, many of which are incorporating state-of-the-art BAS solutions", according to Senior Analyst David Clayton, the principal author of ARC's "Building automation systems worldwide outlook".

The move towards increasing enterprise integration enhances the need for advanced BAS solutions.

Companies across all vertical building markets are striving to increase integration across the entire enterprise to improve information management and optimise the strategic decision-making process.

As BAS increasingly adopt IT standards, they are increasingly converging with traditional IT infrastructures.

Integration between BAS and enterprise systems allows companies to optimise such applications as energy management and maintenance operations.

For example, enterprise integration can optimise energy management by allowing energy management solutions to monitor utility rates in real-time and collect energy use over a group of buildings set apart geographically.

Using this data, energy management solutions can analyse the enterprises' energy portfolio and place certain buildings in a particular energy-saving mode based on real energy usage data and real-time energy rates.

Maintenance operations also benefit greatly from enterprise integration because it provides enterprise systems access to critical building parameters at the corporate level, which allows facilities managers to base critical strategic decisions on real-time, asset health information as opposed to guesses and hunches.

As more companies enhance their enterprise integration, they will increasingly invest in integrated BAS.

Through the adoption of existing Internet standards for BAS data communication, suppliers have made it possible for BAS to communicate with enterprise systems using off-the-shelf technology already being employed in the majority of commercial and industrial buildings today.

With the adoption of Internet communication standards, such as Ethernet, TCP/IP, web servers and XML, the price of integrating BAS with existing enterprise systems is lowered dramatically because the level of customisation necessary is reduced dramatically.

Adoption of IT standards in the BAS industry, and the inherent cost savings regarding BAS integration, is causing many building owners to rethink the value proposition of integrated BAS.