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Over the next ten years, the HVAC industry is poised to recover well in the US markets while China markets show a decline and European markets are stagnating. A new report by Navigant research says, the global revenues for commercial HVAC systems will almost double from $22.8 billion in 2015, to touch USD 47.5 billion by 2024. The report analysed the global markets for the market trends of seven energy-efficient technologies worldwide. These are the main components of commercial heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. It tracked their revenues and market spread over the next decade.

Almost 40% of the global energy consumption is through HVAC products, followed by commercial buildings. Rising concerns over the environmental impact of energy generation and the uncertainly over the pricing in the energy markets have pushed efficiency improvements in HVAC equipment and related products. The impact of HVAC products’ prices and efficiencies on the global energy scenario, therefore, will be huge.

In the United States, this growth will be steady, after an initial recovery phase, but in China it is declining sharply, which is a cause for concern. Europe is largely stagnated at the same consumption figures. The good news is that globally, this growth will be steady, and achieve the purpose of optimal energy utilization that most HVAC manufacturers and users aim for, largely due to falling operating costs and tighter environmental standards requirements.

The report, Energy-Efficient HVAC Systems for Commercial Buildings, analyzed the global market trends for energy-efficient commercial HVAC systems that include unitary systems, heat pumps, furnaces, boilers, VRF systems, chillers, and geothermal heat pumps. It also examined the major technologies that drive this industry and profiled the key players in the sector.

Globally, increasing awareness for energy efficiency coupled with constantly rising healthcare costs, is creating a new interest in exploration of new technologies that will encourage more efficient utilization of energy in the sector- driven by better monitoring and control. The market for energies revenue is expected to reach USD 2.2 billion by 2024, and will be driven by an increasing demand for resilient, resource- optimising technologies in the sector. This has been maintained by a report titled Energy Management for Healthcare Markets, by Navigant research.

Given the fact than an average hospital uses 2.5 times as much energy as any other commercial building, this is an extremely sensitive issue for costs as well as efficiencies, not to mention environmental awareness discussions.

Various new innovations are being pushed for existing energy management systems (EMSs), along with an increasingly high awareness for usage control for keeping the energy bills in the industry in check. They have support form technologies like SaaS that help to optimise the delivery and usage of energy in the facilities, at costs that are not very high upfront.

The tipping factor in these studies and the rising consciousness of energy wastage or over use in healthcare facilities has been a series of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, and hurricane Sandy. These incidents have provided the impetus for development of more resilient power sources that can continue to help the doctors save lives, even during natural calamities.

The report minutely examined the existing global market, its technologies and logistics and the barriers as well as drivers for the current HVAC controls, lighting controls and building energy management systems, as also the micro grid software across the policy and technology landscape in five regions. It worked on identifying and studying the key technologies in healthcare energy management systems, the players in the markets and the scope of the field.

In 2014, there were only 664,000 patients who could or would remotely monitor their health. Over the next five years, the number will reach 4,000,000! Based on the findings on a new report by HIS technology, about 324,000 patients who were on RPM devices were monitoring congestive heart failure and this number will grow by 34% CAGR over the next five years, to reach 1.9 million.

Of the total patients, 120, 3000 were monitoring diabetes, and this number is set to grow by 35% to 712,820 by 2020.

According to this new report by IHS Technology, COPD and hypertension and mental health were the next in line for remote patient monitoring usage, and were expected to grow at similar CAGRs- 38% over the next 5 years.

With increasing availability and utilization of the IoT, its commercial arm for enterprises, the demand for M2M technology modules is about to shoot through the roof. Used as the application arm of Internet of Things, M2M is finding utilization in an increasing number of industries. Today it is being used across varied and diverse industries with extremely good effect. The advantages it provides help meet most of the challenges faced by enterprises in the current industry scenario, and M2M is fast becoming an imperative in sectors such as healthcare, to utilities distribution – oil pipeline and smart grid management .

It is largely enterprise demand for M2M that is driving this rate of adoption and also the M2M modules which are essentially the chips that enable data processing and communication between M2M devices. This explosion in utility will drive the market from USD 1.6 m in 2015 to USD 4.5 billion in 2018. The market, according to additional comments by IDC, is also being pushed upwards by tier 1 mobile SPs, who are encashing on the ubiquity and much enhanced value it provides to the communication industry.

However, it is the transport vertical, fleet management that will be the largest user of M2M modules, with energy management in smart grid investments and mandates driven by the government, all through 2018.

With energy fast becoming a scarce resource, optimized usage is the top priority of utility enterprises. It is not only about the availability but also about management and ensuring optimal distribution, on need basis. On the other hand, distribution needs to be much more streamlined, and intuitive.

Technologies s that can drive these needs of the energy industry is still nascent but fast catching up.

Solutions that will provide the ability for real time monitoring and pre-emptive strategizing will be the need of the hour. Besides, the industry needs the advantage provides by Data and analytics tools to a much greater extent, now that analytical tools are available for mining the data and using it for intelligent insights.

These insights will go a long way in driving the right business strategies that are aligned to the business objectives. What is needed are Smart engineering platforms that help align mobile/ M2M, Advance analytics and high performance computing foundations, to deliver an intelligent operations and remote monitoring application. This sits on vertical solutions, on top of the intelligent platform and delivers customized services to client specific business imperatives.

Today, the energy vertical that is facing myriad challenges ranging from technical loss or theft of power, unplanned outages, overload on transformers, and imbalance on circuits or even equipment failure that could result in inconsistent power quality or distribution, causing significant financial losses for energy companies worldwide. Challenges like minimizing the carbon footprint, enhancing real-time/ near real-time operational intelligence to support advanced demand response, dynamic pricing, smart metering and micro grid implementations are gaining significant traction across the utilities value chain.

In the current business environment, forward looking enterprises realize that the success of their business roadmap depends on their ability to tap and address disruptive innovations through agility and efficiency generated by robust new technologies. Only when the brand is moulded by the market dynamics, does it succeed. In addition, the trends today all point to one definitive requirement for any applications- the ability to provide high efficiency at low cost.

While upgrading to the modern grid and advanced distribution networks can help utilities address these challenges and critical business imperatives, companies continue to be slow in transforming operating technologies. Legacy network infrastructure in the utilities sector creates bottlenecks to adopting latest technology and applications that use them- IoT and M2M, for instance. In addition, significant capital investment required for upgrading or replacing the existing infrastructure and re aligning the operational environment, is another roadblock to transformation focused policies.

Despite the possible transformation scenarios, stakeholders still struggle with achieving a smooth transition and rapid time-to-value along the journey, while ensuring a seamless OT and IT convergence in an advanced infrastructure. And most importantly, the challenge of how to ensure that these upgrades help utilities to derive actionable insights, utilising remote intelligence to aid reactive operational efficiency in the long run.

It is no wonder then that an increasing number of utilities companies worldwide are moving towards smart grids/ advance automation to manage utilities assets and distributed generation infrastructure and adoption of smart meters. To ensure that the smart grid and advance resource monitoring platforms integrate with infrastructure and operational environment seamlessly, support the development of actionable insights and enhanced context awareness and collaboration among systems, processes and user groups, enterprises need technologies that encourage they talk to each other- clearly. Then regulatory compliance, simplicity and cost reduction will get the top priority for strategy and it is precisely here that IoT and M2M will have a critical role to play – enabling transparent communication and complete breakdown of restrictive data silos.

One of the most significant technologies that are invaluable in the utility vertical, is one that uses the next generation of IoT/M2M solutions. The solutions provide an intelligent platform for distribution & control system Monitoring, Remote Management and Real-Time Operational Intelligence. A scalable and extensible architecture that meets diverse application needs, security & regulatory mandates, it is a cost effective solutions to realize critical business objectives through optimum OT& IT convergence. Since it offers a strong alignment of domain specific compliances and SLAs with robust program governance, it has the ability to offer maximum ROI footprints and Time-to-Value.

An efficient cognitive intelligence platform developed for the industry operates on three layers of service integration: Aggregate>Access>Act. This system can then deliver frameworks that ensure flexibility, better risk mitigation strategy, improved time-to-value and speed-to-market through an incremental realization of ROI and new way of doing things.