400 to 500 vision system integrators in German speaking countries ?

The success of vision turn-key systems, which are covered here in the Automation section, depends highly on the availability, know how and expertise of system integrators. This is demonstrated especially in countries where there are not yet enough of these vision integrators present, e.g. Turkey or India. As result, also the growth of the vision product and component market is much slower there than could be expected looking at the demand in the industries.

The importance of the system integrator breed was reason enough for us to especially highlight them in the most recent print edition of the INSPECT (02/08), which can be viewed as e-paper or downloaded at www.inspect-online.com.

All in all we managed to list 100 integration companies in Germany-Austria-Switzerland, some of them with a small company portrait. My personal guess is, that in the German speaking countries alone the real number of these companies might be a factor 4-5 higher.

I hope to get some comments for this estimate and I also hope to see input from a lot of these companies in this Automation section in the future