The global market for electronic access control will top $3.5 billion in 2014 —an increase of 7.6% over the previous year— driven by returning growth in the Americas and other emerging regions, according to IHS Technology. Despite its historically slow-paced evolution compared to other security industry disciplines, e.g. video surveillance, the electronic access control market could begin to see rapid changes in the short to medium term, the research firm suggests.

IHS notes that many new entrants, such as Axis Communications, are maneuvering to stake a claim in the space. Furthermore, new end-user demand from the residential market and continued adoption of newer technologies such as wireless electronic locks are also expected to advance the market.

For hardware, much of the growth will be driven by electronic locks which can either be offline-standalone, data on card, or wireless-online.

Wireless devices continue to see strong growth as end users begin to trust and understand the technology.

IHS also projects that open standards will begin to take shape for the access control industry in 2014, although widespread adoption may take a few more years.

Prior to investing in the R&D, many suppliers are waiting to see how the rest of the industry will adopt and implement standards. The industry’s standards efforts include the Physical Security Interoperability Association’s (PSIA) work on the Physical-Logical Access Interoperability (PLAI) specification, which would generate a link with active directory and other applications to create more automated processes.