Platform ticket for RFID progress

With the mandate from Metro now in place, the Wal-Mart one looming and European standards settling down at last, RFID in Europe should be set for a major boost in 2005.

Technology providers are still working out the best way for them to support their customers' efforts in this and there are

One that has caught the eye in recent weeks is a joint platform that SAP and Infineon have put together to help user organisations deploy RFID faster.

The two companies are also suggesting that this offering can reduce costs and risks for those embracing the technology (whether they want to or not).

It is based on established technology - SAP's NetWeaver and lnfineon's You-R OPEN platforms - and should help users manage implementations of all sizes.

That means it would work on a project to put tags on a small number of cases or pallets for a particular product or on one to RFID-enable a large enterprise application. And everything in between.

The partners said at the launch in October that the new offering would be available immediately for retail companies to use in pilot exercises. But they added that it could also work on "more complex installations" in manufacturing, high-tech and aerospace companies.

Bodo Ischebeck, Infineon's senior director for identification solutions, explains: "We've been in discussion with SAP about this for a long time - about two-and-a-half years."

He highlights the new offering's ability to help companies control their "device management". Being able to build the necessary middleware into an RFID implementation and tie it into software, "especially SAP software", a re also part of the plan here.

On this guestion of devices, it's the RFID readers that have been presenting a particular problem in this, RFID's most interesting, year so far.

Ischebeck points to the heterogeneity of many of the readers on the market and in the field.

Managing different kit from different manufacturers together is never easy and the Infineon executive admits that much of the systems integration pain his company has faced this year has come from having to make different RFID readers work as part of the same solution.

"We are agnostic on readers," he stresses. "It doesn't matter to us if it's UHF or 13.56 MHz, our tags or Philips's, or even if we have to include barcode scanning. We'll work on any project."

The slap-and-ship attitude that many suppliers have adopted - with a view to doing the absolute minimum to meet the mandates of retailers - has included slapping readers onto IT infrastructure.

He believes companies need to look beyond slap-and-ship because there's much more value to be had from RFID. "It's not sufficient to buy a reader and write some code; you need some kind of platform," he says.

Two's company

For Roland Edwards, a senior member of SAP's global communications team, the important point in this new arrangement is that the software provider has a technology partner it can lean on and move forward with on RFID. "We know we're not alone," he says.

Infineon did play a small role alongside SAP in the groundbreaking Metro Future Store Initiative that began in April 2003. Some of the tags the retailer used alongside SAP's supply chain solutions were Infineon ones, but that was as far as it went.

Ischebeck explains that Infineon had taken a decision to focus more on industrial sectors, such as automotive, than on the retail and consumer products supply chain - up till now anyway.

"It's the connection to the IT system that is the essential part," he says. "We are now trying to take that experience and use it to address consumer products as that's where the demand is at the moment."

He insists that the rise of RFID won't stop there though. He points out that most industries, even the more complex ones, require data that you can store efficiently on a tag.

Roland Edwards agrees and says the beauty of the new joint solution is that it's not limited to consumer goods or retail.

This is just as well as he too believes RFID will affect the business world much more deeply than by helping us manage the flow of cases and pallets. "Within 18 months, the pharmaceutical industry will take over," he says.