Features Research
IHS Markit looks at year ahead for electronic access control

• Access control will continue to play a larger role in enterprise through deeper integrations with video surveillance, business processes and IoT.

• Mobile credentials and biometrics will be two of the top hardware trends to watch along with logical/physical integrations and remote services such as access-control-as-a-service (ACaaS).

Mobile credential downloads will triple

Approximately 4.5 million credentials were estimated to have been downloaded in 2016. IHS Markit forecasts that this number will triple to around 13.5 million in 2017.

The reason for the strong growth is two-fold:

• The market sentiment believes that, as in other industries, mobile credentials in access control is not only a strong value proposition by itself, but mobile credentials also have the ability to unlock a more integrated and better value system for the end user while also allowing providers new avenues of services that can support revenues streams going forward.

• In addition, mobile credentials are not competing against the traditional physical card at this time and therefore have a potential market equal to that of smart cards.

Electronic locks in emerging regions

Meanwhile, electronic lock growth in emerging countries globally will expand by about 9 per cent. Eastern Europe and Africa will lead all other regions with an estimated growth of 17 per cent for electronic locks in 2017.

New biometric technologies

Facial recognition will make further strides towards establishing itself as the second most popular type of biometric reader.

IHS Markit forecasts an increasing interest in facial recognition over iris recognition.

Chinese manufacturers will gain share

Although China’s impact on access control has been far less profound compared to video surveillance, China will begin to have more influence on trends across APAC as well as the global access control market beginning in 2017, IHS Markit predicts.

In China, new factories crop up seemingly every month. Each new factory is keen to establish itself in terms of market share and, as a result, enters with extremely competitive pricing.

AliExpress and the increasing number of English speaking freight-forwarding companies in Guangdong will also make it easier than ever for Western distributors and integrators to acquire products direct from these factories.

IP-enabled controllers will experience double-digit growth

Global unit shipments of IP-enabled access controllers will grow at double the rate of other panel variants in 2017.

The growth of the market for IP-based panels reflects greater use of web-based and online products.

As access control systems move from PC-based to mobile-based control elements, the associated infrastructure will likely follow suit.