Tune into RFID

One of the keywords that emerged from the event was 'partnership'. You cannot complete an RFID implementation on your own. You need partners to be able to provide

• Hardware - tags, readers, scanners etc
• RFID middleware
• Systems Integration
• Enterprise Architecture software
• ERP applications
• Business Intelligence applications
• RFID applications - to exploit the RFID data you're generating
• Building Design

And from a user's perspective, although you'd want all of this 'from one player',
no-one currently has all that expertise under one roof. Perhaps that's why, as one speaker said, "RFID pilots are easy; solutions are hard."

One area that attracted user interest at the Forum was the role of Active Tags. The default for many companies interested in RFID has been Passive Tags, which do not have their own transmitter, but reflect radio waves back from a reader's antenna. Active tags have their own transmitter and power source - usually a battery - and broadcast a signal.

In the drive to get tag cost down, the default move from the RFID industry has been towards Passive tags, which are far cheaper, costing perhaps around 10-20 cents when bought in bulk, than Active Tags which can cost considerably more. However the additional functionality of Active Tags in areas such as read-range (upto 100m in some cases), and data storage capacity, offers significant application potential in areas such as real-time location systems.

Wavetrend, which supplies Active tags, believes applications such as fleet optimisation, location-based systems and asset tracking all lend themselves better to Active tags than Passive ones. Indeed, it suggests many organisations that have adopted Passive technology are struggling to make it work in applications that in hindsight might have been better suited to Active tags. No doubt the debate will rumble on.

IDTechEx has done significant work in this area, producing a study on the growth of Active RFID

http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/view.asp?productcategoryid=125

Significantly, however, it may be 2010 before companies' RFID pilots are completed, and the tag costs - either Passive or Active - have come down sufficiently to tip organisations over the edge into seeing a Return on Investment (ROI) and starting large-scale rollouts in anger. Too many organisations, RFID specialists complain, still remain obsessed by tag costs rather than seeing the long-term business benefits and competitive potential of the technology. The airlines, some claim, are particularly guilty of blinkered thinking, especially when it comes to RFID to improve the efficiency of baggage handling.