BizAnalyst Network

Question: Companies have taken the first step in RFID. They've complied with WalMart, the Department of Defense and so on, sometimes by what's been called "slap-and-ship." What's next?
Vesset: I think that varies from company to company. Some have a very compelling business case in their distribution centers and others have to look a little bit more. What a lot of people are doing is using the data they're getting from WalMart and the data they're gaining inside their own facilities to figure out where that next step is — basically doing some sort of analytics to determine where to go next.

Question: What technologies are in the works that will help with the process of integrating raw RFID data with other applications?
Vesset: What happened when the middleware first came out was a rush to implement what was originally the Savant standard for basic filtering. Over time you've got the ALE standard that's come out, which some of the vendors are embracing and others are not. The theory was, you were going to be able to take filtered data and draw it right back into your enterprise. But the reality is — and I think you've seen this in the recent alliances in the middleware market — that the middleware market has divided itself into two classes: the people who are doing core services around filtering and pure device management, and people who are doing higher-level application logic. And it's the combination of the two pieces that will actually get you something useful enough for a third-party system to use. In the longer term, some of your existing applications are going to be able to read or deal with more and more kinds of raw RFID data.

Question: At the onset of RFID, a lot of people were afraid that the sheer volume of RFID data was going to overwhelm networks. Is that still an issue?
Vesset: Yes. If anything, that's a growing issue. The reason is that in a slap-and-ship environment, your volume of RFID reads is pretty darned low. But as soon as you start doing something interesting or compelling in terms of use case, like trying to pass a pallet through a dock door, for example, or put something on stretch wrapper, you're going to find that the number of reads that come off that reader will increase exponentially. So you need to have that filtering capability somewhere out at the edge. Some people are taking the approach that it should actually be on the reader itself. Others are saying it should be at the network layer. But everyone is saying all those core services need to be located at the facility [warehouse or factory] itself.