New York, NY—According to a Frost & Sullivan study, 2004 revenues in the food-and-beverage market were $2.7 billion. The global automation-and-software solutions market has had moderate growth rate in the past. However, the company expects manufacturers' investment in automation to increase due to new developments in technology and regulatory requirements.

For the study, the total market comprised six products representing different facets of manufacturing plant automation:

• PLCs;
• Distributed control systems (DCS);
• Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)/Human machine interface (HMI) systems;
• Manufacturing execution systems (MES);
• Industrial asset management (IAM) solutions; and
• Plate heat exchangers (PHE).

For 2004, PLCs were the largest product segment, with 63.1% of the total automation-and-software solutions in the world's food-and-beverage market. Manufacturing execution systems (MES) had a 6.8% share in 2004 and is likely to increase to 10.7% by 2011.

For more information: www.frost.com