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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: spiral3 who wrote (19023)	2/29/2000 10:41:00 AM
From: konabound	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

David: ELON Markets: <Would BACnet Solutions be more or less expensive than LonWorks Solutions in this market ?> No, BACnet is not the best for sensor network, it is more of a systems network protocol. But there are other protocols that have been around for years for sensors including Modbus, HART, and many other standard and proprietary protocols. The trick is getting them to link to systems. The market is changing from when these could be separate systems of their own to being interoperable with others now. So in this case it is not Lonworks vs BACnet, but rather Lonworks versus other sensor networks. It is in the sensor network arena that Lonworks has done very well particularly in the building automation market. They are still a minor player in the industrial sensor market. <What proportion of the sensor market would the smaller sensor providers service. > Hard question to answer briefly and quickly. Depends upon the market, definition of small, type of sensor etc. But since sensors tend to be relatively easy to develop and produce compared to central control systems, there are many small specialized sensor manufacturers. In many cases the sensor elements might be produced by one company and several different manufacturers will purchase that element to incorporate into a sensor/transducer they make. Purely as an example, the hazardous gas sensor market in the U.S. has a major manufacturer who might have 20% of the market and medium size firms capturing about 40% and smaller firms with the rest. A large manufacturer in this case might have only $50 Million and there are dozens of firms with less than $2 - 5 Million in sales. <In both the BACnet and the Lonworks case this would only be a problem if you were trying to interface two very different devices that would normally not have a reason for interface. Does this happen a lot in the controls industry ?> Not a major situation now, but it is becoming more and more popular. Realize that it has only been in the last 2 - 4 years that integrators were seriously trying to integrate fire alarm systems digitally into centralized building automation controls, and even more recent that they were trying to integrate building controls into plant/production controls. A lot of manufacturers have been living very comfortably in their little worlds for years and are now finding customers demanding more interoperability. This is why more companies have come out with products with Ethernet output or Lonworks, BACnet and other "standard" protocol output in the past few years.