Profibus and Profinet International (PI) has announced there are now 10 million Profinet devices installed in the market, and at the end of 2014, more than 50 million Profibus devices were installed in industrial plants worldwide, about 3.6 million more than the previous year.

Profibus PA is also recording steady growth. Around 9 million PA devices are now installed in the process automation sector including around 800,000 more than in 2013. PI predicts that the technology’s growth curve is expected to continue.

According to a market study on trends in Ethernet-based systems from ARC,  the growth of Profinet is expected to exceed that of its competitors and the general Industrial Ethernet market. In the future, ever-greater amounts of data will have to be transferred to autonomous systems, higher-level systems such as MOM (Manufacturing Operation Management), or other locations via the cloud.