Schneider Electric and Siemens lead the building energy management systems (BEMS) market, according to a recent report by Navigant Research.
More than 400 companies now provide the energy management software for buildings, according to the report. Competition is fierce, says Navigant, and companies in the $2.4 billion market range from industry stalwarts to software startups.
The finding comes as building efficiency grows in importance with more and more cities requiring that building owners benchmark and disclose building performance.
One of the latest cities to do so was Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the city council voted July 28 that large commercial, institutional, and multifamily buildings must quantify and disclose energy performance. Neighboring Boston has similar rules, as does Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, according to the Institute for Market Transformation.
BEMS help buildings in collecting energy data and managing energy operations.
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“The rise of BEMS has enabled new levels of insight into and analysis of energy and operational data that was not possible just five years ago,” says Eric Bloom, principal research analyst with Navigant Research. “This intensely competitive market will more than double in size over the next six years, reaching $5.6 billion in annual market value by 2020.”
Known globally as a vendor of building control systems, Schneider Electric has leveraged its knowledge of individual building systems to provide much higher-level analytics capabilities in the last five years, Navigant said.
Meanwhile, the report finds that Siemens, which has historically lagged behind other buildings industry giants in the BEMS market, leapfrogged by acquiring Pace Global Energy Services, a management software company and consultancy with a C-suite focus.
Navigant says that other top vendors are Elster Energy/ICT, Johnson Controls, Verisae, IBM, Cylon Active Energy, C3 Energy, GridPoint and Ecova.
The “Navigant Research Leaderboard Report: Building Energy Management Systems” examines the strategy and execution of 14 leading BEMS players that provide enterprise-level energy management and sophisticated data analytics. It rates the vendors on 10 criteria: vision, go-to-market strategy, partnership strategy, technology & solution portfolio, geographic coverage, user interface, breath/depth of applications, technology openness & interoperability, customer acquisition and partnerships, and scalability and staying power.
