RFID - The last few years

For almost 3 years, I've been working in various roles for OATSystems in Massachusetts, USA on RFID software projects. See www.oatsystems.com.

We started as a small consultancy helping Gillette, MIT and others deploying the first EPC/RFID systems and have envolved into a midsize (100 person) company with worldwide deployments.

I've watched the industry mature from hardware/software that didn't work and took an extraordinary amount of effort to deploy, to something that is fairly straightforward (at least for us)and is starting to provide useful results to businesses.

It is quite exciting to see customers eyes light up when they start to understand what can be done with the data. Being able to watch in real-time what your supply chain is doing is going to allow re-architecting of many businesses. The next steps are going to be even more fun - imagine adding "rules" on top of your business that you can monitor and -- gasp -- optimize in real-time. This goes far beyond what we dreamed possible while I was at i2.

Obviously the industry has quite a few challenges to overcome first -- such as gen2 compliant architectures and lower tag costs. plus the education of a few hundred companies. The burning question in my mind -- Can you remove significant costs/radically change your offering with new processes, RFID + other sensors? If not , can your competitors? My bet is that someone is going to do this soon....