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What's the big deal anyway?

Ok, so I am told it might be Victor Hugo who said that and not Newton. A quick search on the web produced all kinds of results, some attributed to Hugo and some to Newton. Unless I find it from a credible source, I will leave it as Newton's quote.

So, why do I belive RFID is such a great idea, three reasons

It can be cheap, I know, I know, if you are a manufacturer bending over backwards to comply with Wal-Mart you may violently disagree. But this is just getting started, as the demand increases and the technology improves moore's law comes into effect. I expect 5 cent tag 5-7 years from now. The Readers are already a whole lot better than there predecessors in terms of smarts, as the volume increase, I expect prices to go down considerably

It can be pervasive, from the shop floor to the top floor. It makes sense at Pallet and Case level today, it will become more compelling at an item level soon (though I dont expect an RFID-Tagged can of coke in my life time).  Anti-counterfeit use for Pharmaceuticals can reduce grey market (and safe lives), every business can gain from better Asset management. Governments are looking to put it on passports, drivers license, citizen cards etc. Manufacturing has been using it for matching sub-assemblies and tracking manufacturing processes and inventories for years. It is a compelling technology to link the physical world to the digital world or enable 'Internet of things' as they say.

Its driven by the industry, not the technology players. My guess over 100 thousand suppliers around the world will have to comply with Wal-Mart like mandates from their suppliers in next 3 years. Hospitals, airports, theme parks etc are adopting the technology slowly but surely. Business cases are evolving but most are stuck at cost or the hardware to improve, something thats bound to happend over time.

What can pour cold water on all this grand plans, the following 4 come to my mind

Lack of acceptable, vendor adopted standards, without which Tags and Readers can not interoperate, customer software will be needed to connect with Readers from differnt vendors and manage data

Lack of robust, scalable, easy to deploy software from proven vendors, who will be around to support an enterprise deployment. Its pretty confusing today if you are a customer, you have to custom develop a good portion of the "RFID Middleware" on your own, if you want something that can scale.

The "Physics" never improve, you need 100% tag reads, if you miss a Case, the value prop is down the drain. Read rates are important, reade accuracy around challenging environments (Metals, Liquids etc) is key.

Privacy concerns can lead the Retailers to drop the ideas, legislations could stall the adoption

As always, I welcome your thoughts

Published Wednesday, November 10, 2004 4:20 PM by javeds

Comments

# re: What's the big deal anyway?

You mention privacy concerns around RFID. I think a more applicable framing of that thought is "perception of privacy issues". Yes, it would be possible to build a poorly designed RFID system that does not protect the privacy of individuals. At the same time, it would be possible to build one that does (I'll capitulate that the latter is more work). In conversations I've had on this subject the majority of the time someone is railing against RFID because of privacy they haven't much knowledge on how the technology actually works (maybe they should read your RFID 101 links :-) ). What we end up with is some folks (sometimes, very intelligent folks) who espouse very strong beliefs that RFID is bad from a privacy perspective when they haven't, perhaps, taken the time to understand the technology, consider how to mitigate the areas of privacy risk and consider that there are some value propositions that RFID enables which would appeal to some subset of the overall population.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004 4:56 PM by Jeff Williams

# More Architect Bloggers

Thursday, November 11, 2004 2:18 PM by Harry Pierson's DevHawk Weblog

# re: What's the big deal anyway?

I agree. In the papers I link to the privacy speacialists at Microsoft has gone in to great detail on what is real and what is not and how the technology can address the real concerns.

Javed
Thursday, November 11, 2004 12:30 PM by Javed Sikander

# re: What's the big deal anyway?

Dear Javed Sikander,

I thought you may be interested in knowing that TagStone is an active RFID
system integrator in the Middle East based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
We are currently working on promoting the adoption of RFID technology by
industry leaders here in the region. Our focus applications include
baggage tracking, warehouse management, retail store, and the oil and gas
industry.
Recently, we created the Exorno Alliance with partners such as Siemens
Dematic, Sun Microsystems, Printronix and others, similar to that of
EPCstars in the United States. We are also going to be launching a
demonstration and testing facility as a 'proof-of-concept' center.

Between mid-December and early January we plan to host "Got RFID?" an
event promoting the adoption of RFID to governments, the regions largest
retailers and manufacturers, as well as major oil companies across the
Middle East.

Friday, November 12, 2004 5:03 AM by Faisal Al-Gharabally

# re: What's the big deal anyway?

While I completely agree with the thoughts around "the perception of privacy issue" being the actual barrier to rapid adoption, I continue to struggle with how to overcome this. The recently presented privacy paper is a good start, though I think we need a stronger consumer facing position in addition a " policy" position. Consumer are using RFID everyday and loving it, .ie toll tags, payment devices, ordering devices at sporting events etc. We need to figure out how to message this a lot better than we are today
Friday, November 12, 2004 7:22 AM by Brian Scott

# re: What's the big deal anyway?

While the Luddite in me almost says "no-way", it is easily won over by the optimist and realist. Let us look at the first two of the 4 points you mention in your "cold water scenario":

1. Lack of standards for reader-tag interoperation. This is the state of affiars today, but is being addressed by EPC as we speak. What is more of a problem here is the different frequency of operations in different countries (and the fact that many countries such as China/India are yet to decide on these). But we will have tags that respond to multiple frequencies for products that ship cross-country. Reader-interoperability across continents is less of an issue.

2. Scalable, reliable software: again, this is a short-term problem. Think databases in early eighties and how they evolved to be the most robust systems -- I would contend more robust than OS (even though I work for the company that makes Windows :-)). The fact is the set of players in this space have learnt a lot from those experiences and will bring those learnings to bear. So a transactional RFID event-processing and routing in a server/service with cluster support for fail-over and scalability will be real in short order.

I will comment on the other two points and what I think are the primary impediments tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004 8:55 PM by Sriram

# re: What's the big deal anyway?

The technology is still nascent. The tag manufacturers are developing the tags in their silos, hence the lack of standards for frequencies, lack of common device interfaces, lack of data capture/forwarding interfaces.
Unless industry OS leaders take upon themselves, the technology will be at the mercy of the tag manufacturers.
I have been thinking why SoA can't be used for RFID middleware? Can BPEL4WS be extended for RFID?
Thursday, November 18, 2004 8:30 PM by Neeraj Kulkarni
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