Realising the full potential of these management systems, however, requires a level of sophistication that many current building operations and maintenance staff lack, the Pike Research study, Smart Building Managed Services, notes. It adds that the gap has led to growing demand for smart building managed services (SBMS), which are essentially outsourced versions of BEMS.
This SBMS market will grow more rapidly over the remainder of the decade than the wider BEMS market, Pike Research predicts. The analyst forecasts worldwide spending on these outsourced services, which include data acquisition and analytics, as well as building maintenance contracts, will grow from $291m in 2012 to $1.1bn by 2020 – equating to a compound annual growth rate of nearly 18%, compared to the BEMS market rate of 14%.
“Dwindling resources and diminishing skill levels have significantly impaired the effectiveness of efficiency initiatives in many commercial buildings,” said Pike Research senior research analyst Eric Bloom.
“Turning these initiatives over to experts who continuously monitor the facilities, searching for opportunities to reduce energy costs and improve operations, enables building owners to access the full capabilities of BEMS.”
He added that SBMS vendors, however, face significant competition, particularly from the proliferation of utility demand-side management (DSM) programmes.
Looking for ways to engage with their customer bases and, more importantly, ways to manage the increasing demand for electricity production, utilities have created DSM offerings that provide many of the benefits of SBMS. As a result, many building owners and operators now expect that many of the services SBMS vendors provide are already available from their local utilities.
