Sun Microsystems
and HP are looking for partners in their quest to grab more market share in the emerging RFID
Sun is planning to announce that it’s created reference architectures for small, medium and large implementations, executives from the company told internetnews.com. The goal is to make it easier for customers and integrators to get up to speed.
As part of its increased commitment, Sun has amped up partner offerings for RFID, introduced a compliance testing service and began shipping a warehouse management
offering.
HP announced closer collaboration with professional
services firm BearingPoint and a consolidated offering for industry
verticals.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology automates and extends
the gathering of information such as is found on bar codes. While a person
must point a bar code reader directly at individual barcodes, RFID tags
automatically communicate a unique numeric code when they pass within a few
meters of a reader. Middleware immediately sends that information to a
database, where it’s available for use by enterprise information systems.
Sun’s reference architectures will let customers benefit from Sun’s previous engagements, said Julie Sarbacker, director of the RFID business
unit at Sun. “We’re capturing the methodologies for how these engagements
are delivered so we can reuse it,” she said. “We’re not taking the approach
of, ‘Throw us money, and we’ll make this work for you.’ We’re taking a
productized approach, so customers can benefit from our experience with
quicker and lower cost.”
Sun has launched an RFID-specific offering in order to give partners access to its iForce program technical and marketing resources. Independent hardware and
software vendors and systems integrators in the program can make use of the
Sun Java System RFID
Software Toolkit to build their own adapters for the wide variety of
hardware that Sun expects to come on the market.
Device adapters let RFID readers communicate with Sun’s Java System RFID
Software. Sun said the toolkit, which leverages the NetBeans, has the
potential to reduce
development time for RFID adapters by more than 50 percent.
“We have adapters for the major manufacturers of readers and printers.
There will be a lot more hardware manufacturers coming to market with new
products,” said Sarbacker. “This way, [partners] won’t get bottleneck
waiting for us to build the adapters; they can do it themselves.”
Participants in the iForce RFID program also will be able to access news,
documentation and software downloads from the partner site. Theyll be able
to work with Sun on customer pilots at Sun RFID Test Centers.
Sun also announced a retail compliance program to help manufacturers deal
with the > various tagging mandates from customers such as Wal-Mart
and the Department of Defense.
“A lot of manufacturers faced with mandates from different retailers are
having some difficulties complying,” Sarbacker said. Wal-Mart’s mandate for 100 percent accuracy in reading the tags is especially
onerous, she said. Sun has duplicated the specific requirements of major
retailers at its Dallas test
center, so that manufacturers can test how to make sure their particular
products, packaging and shipping methods comply with their customers’
requirements.
“We’ll do an analysis and tell them which are the best tags and readers
to use, given their portfolio of products and their own facilities,” she
said. “We want to take it beyond that and make sure they look at their whole
architecture and data management, so they can have the information to make
better business decisions.”
Finally, Sun delivered a warehouse management product with long-time
partners SIS
Technologies, a vendor of infrastructure, technical support and services,
and SSA Global, which provides enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
Paul Milo, ERP segment manager for Sun’s market and industries
development group, said the SSA software was easy to drop into Sun’s
framework, enabling ERP systems to take advantage of the RFID data.
“From the crate, the label and all the transactions and inventory you’d
normally do manually are done in an automated version, with all the security
and scalability and tracking built into the system,” he said.
On Monday, HP and OATSystems rolled out RFID/IS (Industrial Strength), a
combination of an RFID framework, systems management, and consulting and
integration services. RFID/IS includes HP OpenView management software, HP
Services, and hardware from servers to storage to printers. The offering is
based on HP’s internal supply chain automation efforts.
HP Labs began experimenting with sensing technologies such as RFID a few
years ago, said Frank Lanza, worldwide RFID director for HP Services, and it
began a pilot project within its own operations. HP and OAT — along with
other vendors –deployed RFID at multiple locations across HPs global
supply chain. OAT’s Foundation Suite middleware enables the translation and
cleansing of data between RFID readers and database or ERP systems.
“Along the way, we got the [retailer] mandates that said they’d like us
to start tagging our goods. That’s how we ended up with a leg up,” Lanza
said. In fact, HP became one of the first eight Wal-Mart suppliers to comply
with the super-retailer’s RFID mandate.
RFID/IS is targeted towards automotive, consumer packaged goods,
pharmaceutical, consumer electronics, retail and high-tech customers. Such
verticalization is part of the next
wave of RFID, according to ABI Research. According to ABI, manufacturers
are moving from simple slap-and-ship tactics to please customers. The focus
has shifted to how they can use RFID to benefit their own operations. But
they’ll need domain expertise from their vendors and consultants
Lanza said that HP didnt want to develop new domain expertise for the
retailing sector. Instead, the company announced an extended partnership
with IT consulting firm BearingPoint.
“We decided we didn’t want to focus in on the business process side of
retailing,” Lanza said. “RFID is a great add-on to some f those service, so
we wanted to partner.”
HP will continue to provide RFID technology up to implementation
integration, while BearingPoint will handle the supply chain work. While the
two companies have worked together for a long time, Lanza said that the
effort to sell into the retail sector as a team is new.
John Cummings, BearingPoint managing director, said, “We do mostly the
strategy and process work and systems integration. HP is mainly focused on
the infrastructure and hardware side of the equation. We’ve combined forces
to make the best of both worlds.”
Cummings said the two companies will go to market together, each taking
the lead when appropriate. They’ll also cooperate on creating new offerings,
not only specific to RFID, “but also enabling the supply chain so it
performs better.”
