According to a new report from IMS Research, the market for industrial networking is still strong. An estimated 31 million new fieldbus and Ethernet nodes were installed worldwide in 2011, and this is expected to grow by an average of 10% a year, to just over 45 million new connected nodes in 2015.
The report, ‘The World Market for Industrial Networking – 2011 Edition’, forecasts that, in EMEA and the Americas, new connected nodes will grow fastest in servo and inverter drives. Their grow rate will be 11.8% a year, resulting in 3.5 million inverter drives and 0.8 million servo drives being connected to a network in 2015. While shipment growth is a key factor, IMS Research is also seeing an increase in the percentage of drives that are network-enabled and connected.
