But the current landscape also presents a unique opportunity to realign with an exciting business approach and forge alliances and partnerships with market participants. The result will be a newly built ecosystem of suppliers capable of effectively addressing end-user needs for both short- and long-term growth prospects.

According to recent Frost & Sullivan research on the industrial services market, a new wave of influence is impacting the business dynamics between end users and providers. This shift is based on new service paradigms that are enabling end users to achieve a high degree of cost optimization and improved operational efficiency. For example, end-user and provider equations are currently being shaped by service architectures based on frameworks defined by advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Services based on such advanced ICT concepts accounted for more than 75 percent of the global industrial services market in 2014.

While spares and maintenance still retain a significant portion of service revenue models, advanced services growth is expected to witness a CAGR of 20 percent in the coming years.

"In order to organize and deliver such advanced services, industrial suppliers need to form alliances with cloud-based data and analytics providers. In some end-use cases, even the most rudimentary solutions built on an integrated analytics package have enabled suppliers to increase sales and raise product prices by up to 10 percent. It also helped achieve technology differentiation in a saturated market," notes Muthukumar Viswanathan of Frost & Sullivan.

Major structural changes will also be seen in the workshop area, driven by the arrival of M2M (machine-to-machine) communication. By 2020, nearly 12 billion devices in the industry are set to be connected via advanced M2M technology.

“There is still a lot of skepticism surrounding this rapid transition to the smart factory framework, however. This can be summed up in one key question that arises in all major industry discussion forums: Who will be the single entity responsible for delivering the integrated solution to the end user?” Mr. Viswanathan continues. “I believe that while emerging business demands would justify an ecosystem approach, there will still be one key partner that liaises with the end user, and I agree that this partner will be the ultimate risk bearer for the final solution delivered to the customer.”.

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