Market Challenges And Opportunities

Global Distributed Control Systems Market Drivers:

Rise in demand for energy across developing countries to boost the market growth

The demand for energy from emerging economies, especially from the BRICS countries is likely to fuel the expansion of oil and gas, power, and related sectors that are one of the major end user industries of distributed control systems. BRICS countries that are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are culturally as well as economically diverse countries; however, all these countries have a common aim that the rapid growth and development of energy industry. These nations are known to be among the top energy-consuming countries accounting currently for nearly 35% of the overall energy consumption. Thus, growing demand for energy in these countries is likely to fuel the need for DCSs, which is further anticipated to drive the market growth over the forecast future.

Increasing adoption for smart applications to fuel the market pace

In recent years, manufacturing facilities and factories around the world are gradually adopting automation equipment to enable high level efficiency and performance. With the emergence of smart-field devices as well as analysis tools, the process automation sector is witnessing a paradigm shift in the sector. The smart field devices are capable of automating some testing protocols. Thus, adoption of smart applications is growing across these industries, which in turn is creating demand for distributed control systems. These factor are further expected to drive growth of the global distributed control systems market during the forecast period.

Global Distributed Control Systems Market Opportunities:

Rise in investment in processing and manufacturing industry is likely to bring multiple growth opportunities in the global distributed control systems market during the forecast period. The adoption of DCS systems is growing rapidly due to rise in investments from industrial sectors such as mining and metal, metallurgy, electronics, and food and beverage industry in emerging economies. The distributed control systems have networking capabilities that can be used in process management and the inputs or outputs can be discrete or analog signal in the processing and manufacturing industries further enhancing the operational efficiency. This in turn will drive the demand for distributed control systems across these industries, which is expected to provide market players with several opportunities.

Use of IoT in oil and gas industry for real-time decision making is expected to provide market players with major business opportunities in the global distributed control systems market during the forecast period. Industries such as power, metal and mining, chemicals, and oil and gas are old industries and with technological development, the manufacturing processes among these industries are improved with advent of systems such as PLC, DCS, and SCADA. The oil and gas industry can redefine its coverage through adoption of automation equipment. The adoption of distributed control systems is growing among manufacturers in oil and gas industry to accelerate the production and exploration processes. Thus, the global distributed control systems market is likely to witness major opportunities in the near future.

Global Distributed Control Systems Market Restraints:

Availability of alternative technologies in the process automation field to hinder the market growth

The end users in major verticals are debating over the efficiency of SCADA/PLC vs DCS. The competition in the overall control systems market has increased in recent years, as several manufacturers are entering the market. PLC/SCADA applications are gradually replacing their DCS counterparts in simple and low-cost applications where product can be seen during the process. Other cases, where the configurations of the systems can be performed later, owing to the application’s generic nature shows that, PLC systems can also be successful in replication of the performance of DCS solutions. Thus, this factor is expected to hinder growth of the global distributed control systems market during the forecast period.

Increasing concerns regarding security and rise in cost competition to hamper the market pace

With increasing technological innovations, the shift of DCS solutions to open-source tools relying on communication on the internet to offer efficient performance, from proprietary-based architecture is growing. DCS solutions are increasingly becoming vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to the lack of credible industry standards focusing on handling of information transfer and rise in adoption of windows-based solutions. This factor in turn is expected to hamper growth of the global distributed control systems market during the forecast period. However, the market is likely to see growth due to growing focus of market players on the development more efficient solutions that offer data safety and security.