Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Advanced Metering Infrastructure Market: Worldwide Market Forecasts and Analysis (2013 - 2018)" report to their offering. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the primary steps for smart grid optimization. To understand the customer needs and to fulfill them in an effective manner, involvement of both consumer and utility companies is essential, which has led to implementation of AMI. Both federal and state governments are implementing AMI systems, which not only reduce cost but also provide other benefits at customer and operational level, such as more effective theft intrusion and detection, personalized tariff plans, improved service quality and easy bill options. Integration of AMI technologies into existing system is growing rapidly; still there are some challenges that hinder the implementation of AMI such as standardization, regulatory control and technological barriers. Executive Summary: Regulatory mandates, the urge for energy conservation and grid modernization initiatives drive the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) market. AMI has taken Automated Meter Reading (AMR) one step further by improving customer engagement activities through two-way communication. While smart meter deployments will save operational cost for utilities along with improved non-technical loss identification like theft/tamper detection and outage notification, AMI systems will also allow for consumer bill savings by means of Time of Use (TOU) billing. Major AMI vendors such as Itron and Landis+Gyr are focused on providing end-to-end integrated services to utilities from hardware and network endpoints to MDM, system integration and managed services. Although the AMI implementation cost is heavily dominated by hardware endpoint, system integration, meter data analytics and MDM as a Service market is expected to grow. The AMI market life-cycle widely varies region-wise, while the North America (NA) region is expected to see a slowdown in smart meter shipments through 2013 to 2018, a surge is expected in AMI professional and Information Technology (IT) related services and solutions such as system integration and meter data analytics in NA; Europe (EU) is expected to hold the largest AMI market share in 2018 followed by the APAC region. This report forecasts the global AMI market to grow from $15.89 billion in 2013 to $28.45 billion in 2018. This represents a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.4% from 2013 to 2018. Research and Markets
