RFID: Setting the standards

People have observed that EPCglobal is different than other standards efforts due to the participation of high-profile end users, such as Wal-Mart, as well as technology providers. How has this changed the standards creation and review process?
I've been involved in some other standards bodies and what's most exciting about Auto-ID and now EPCglobal is that it has been driven largely by the end users of the technology.

At all of the meetings, there are representatives from these companies pushing RFID. Tibco is also working on standards efforts around (Extensible Markup Language) and Web services, for instance. Those are being driven by the academics and the technology providers, and there's a very different tone.

How does it differ specifically from these other standards groups?
EPCglobal is all about getting things done, proving [return on investment] and establishing real standards, not just floating ideas. The end users are able to very aggressively make the trade-offs that are needed to move forward. Typically, standards groups get broken down into committees, which hold lots of meetings. Those groups move very slowly. And when you're done, you often get standards that are too complicated and too big in scope because they're trying to keep everybody involved happy. When that starts to happen at EPCglobal, we have customers there to give us a boot and help keep everything focused.

Is there any feeling among the group that things are potentially moving too quickly in general, and that this could hurt RFID adoption in the long run?
I don't think so. There's a lot of discussion about why we're doing RFID now, whereas with these other standards efforts, there isn't any discussion about the economics of the business. In that respect it's very different from other bodies that I'm familiar with. It's different because EPCglobal is all about completing the standard. A lot of other groups exist purely because people like to get involved with standards for the sake of doing so; they have no incentive to complete the standard or get it out to the market.

With EPCglobal, especially for the end users, it's all about return on investment. For technology companies, like Tibco, it's sort of a disruptive technology that will allow us to build some revenue and get a sense of some new markets that we haven't been involved with in the past. I don't think anyone involved is wondering why we need to do this now or whether or not getting this standards work done will really help RFID development.

Can you give us a ballpark schedule of when you think the group will publish the various standards?
By the middle of this year, you'll have some important standards. And by the end of the year, there will be more. I think that within the next year and a half, you'll see general agreement on most of the necessary guidelines. There will be other standards we need to decide, but we should be able to do in several years' time what it took the bar code industry a decade to do.