RFID: Setting the standards

What are the pressing software standards?
There are different layers that need to be addressed. Once you get past the reader, you need to address the data acquisition and filtering layer. That's important, but not nearly as important as the reader/tag standard. And once you can filter and collect data in a standard way, you can look at how you capture and store the information, and make it available to other enterprise applications. We're working on those and they're important.

A recent report from Forrester Research indicated that a lot of suppliers are struggling to meet Wal-Mart's mandate. Even though Wal-Mart disputed the results of that research, do you think the mandates that are currently out there are fair?
Well, with Wal-Mart, a lot of companies saw the mandate but didn't take it seriously because Wal-Mart has gone through this sort of thing in the past around other issues and has tended to change terms as they've moved along. This is less about RFID than it is about how they train their suppliers to react to this sort of mandate. The suppliers know that Wal-Mart will eventually draw a line in the sand, but they expect the deadline to slip a few times before they absolutely need to react.

What Forrester found was that for many of the suppliers in Wal-Mart's programme, the upfront investment to launch RFID still outweighs the technology's potential short-term benefits. Do you think that there is enough of a business case to encourage companies to work with the technology today?
There are two answers. The first is that if Wal-Mart has it as a mandate to do business with them, they can't afford to ignore it. The second, and it's funny, is the group that is pressing the hardest on RFID right now is [consumer product goods] and retail.

I would argue that there are other industries that could see return on investment from the technology a lot sooner. I think the suppliers have a perfectly legitimate gripe in the sense that there is a large upfront cost and their [return on investment] is still fuzzy. For pharmaceuticals, airlines, [Department of Defense] and others, there's a faster turnaround. With [consumer product goods], the cost of goods is so low and the scale of the project is so high, it's a lot more difficult to make a case.

Do you think this reality could potentially sully the reputation of RFID and any potential benefits it can offer in the long term?
I think that's a very real possibility, as we've probably peaked on the hype curve with RFID, and now we're heading into a stage where there's some disillusionment.

We've had a lot of Tibco customers ask us about [return on investment], and we have to be honest about the upfront costs. Wal-Mart is telling people to run out and buy a lot of equipment they wouldn't have bought on their own. I think if there weren't the mandates out there, the market would be developing very differently. I don't think [consumer product goods] and retail would be looking that hard at RFID, and you'd see leading-edge implementations in some of the other industries I've mentioned.

What about the other mandates, from the Department of Defense, Target and Metro Group? Are these fair?
Some of the other mandates, as you dig into them, are very reasonable. They're not as comprehensive as they might appear. It's only a certain portion of the goods at certain warehouses that are involved, so I think for the most part the mandates are reasonable. No one is expecting to flip a switch and have everything working. The mandates are out there to help people do the work around RFID in phases, and I think that will work.