RSSThe global market for command-and-control room technologies and services was estimated to have been worth US$4.99 billion in 2016, according to research from IHS Markit. North America was estimated to have generated the most revenues at US$1.8 billion.
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The installed base of control rooms is approaching 240,000 worldwide. Public-safety growth is forecast to be low because of efficiencies, both in cost savings and operations, leading to an increase in the consolidation of public-safety control rooms. The transport and utilities sectors are both forecast to grow steadily.
The benefits of consolidation are improved emergency response because of better collaboration, enhanced technology because of bigger budget pools and increased visibility into operations, which save both personnel resource costs and time needed to address incidents.
North America has the biggest installed base of public-safety control rooms with almost 6,000 public-safety answering points (PSAPs) in the United States alone. The Western European installed base is consolidating, especially in the Nordic countries, in some countries in Eastern Europe and in the Netherlands.
Other Western European countries, Germany and France for instance, will likely maintain a high installed base of control rooms and consolidate slowly because of the governance structure in these regions. In Western Europe, there is a strong need for services and consulting especially as the transition to digital communications and Long Term Evolution (LTE) takes place. In addition, the integration of analytics technologies, social media and digital evidence management are supporting the market.
Asia Pacific continues to expand its installed base of control rooms across sectors, including public safety. The Middle East and Africa is experiencing a similar trend as countries in these regions build and advance their emergency response infrastructure to handle more demands on call-taking software. This is because of increasing emergency incidents coming from expanding populations and education surrounding the role of emergency services.
The focus on voice has begun to change in favor of more CAD and data-focused solutions. More data such as incident information, video and images can be made available to resources in the field via tablets or ruggedized smartphones. Additionally, such devices, which run on broadband networks, can be significantly cheaper than their radio counterparts. For this reason, especially in particularly price-sensitive regions such as Asia, there has been a strong preference for broadband devices and CAD systems over radio and voice dispatch.
New applications and technologies are being integrated within the control room and need to be centralized within the CAD. Video, sensors, altering, advanced geographic information systems (GIS) analytics and other technologies can all be connected to CAD, making it faster and more efficient than before.
“With Australia, Japan, South Korea, the United States, United Kingdom and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), going ahead with plans to build out national public-safety broadband networks, the LMR and traditional voice dispatch markets will continue to experience pressures from the entry of broadband-based communications, and systems like CAD and logging will gain greater importance,” said Alex Richardson, critical communications analyst with IHS Markit. “The value of such contracts will only increase because of the vast range of new data inputs they will be required to manage. We see these networks as ecosystem expanders, increasing the value of the control room market beyond traditional applications.”
These and other issues around the control room market will be discussed in detail at the International Critical Control Rooms Congress (ICCRC), scheduled to take place in Geneva 5 – 7 December.
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