A startup with an impressive pedigree, big-name backers and 14 months of interaction with potential customers and standards organizations today unveiled a standards-based, network-oriented architecture for deploying and managing RFID rollouts across and between enterprises.
Backed by venture capital heavy weights Charles River Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners to the tune of $6 million in "A" round funding, Reva Systems Corp. is seeking to eliminate costly custom implementations that in some cases have kept RFID confined to small pilots tactically conceived to meet specific customer mandates. This approach, where proprietary readers scan products with tags that sometimes cost more than the products themselves, has hampered return on investment, raising serious questions about RFID's ability to support revamped and more intrinsically intelligent supply chains.
Enter Reva's Tag Acquisition Network (TAN), which positions the reader as a vital network component that must be managed as an integral component of the enterprise computing infrastructure -- not on a standalone basis. It's a concept similar to Sun Microsystem's "the network is the computer" and EMC Corp's view of network computing, which posits the centricity of storage peripherals.
Using past networking models as precedents (i.e., the LAN, WLAN, SAN, Internet, etc.), the architecture is built on standards such as the Tag-to-Reader Air Protocol; Reader-to-Network Protocol; and RFID Data Access. When implemented, TAN insulates RFID applications from deployment details by invoking a layered model to isolate technical complexity. It also treats the RF spectrum as a shared resource across the enterprise, and provides built-in intelligence to adapt RFID to site-specific requirements and frequency behaviors, the company said.
In an interview, Reva's CEO and co-founder Ashley Stephenson said the Lowell, MA company is introducing a completely new architecture for deploying RFID. "We're not proposing an application or solution for RFID; we are helping people who decide to use RFID to implement and deploy these applications," he noted, adding that the company's mission is all about keeping implementation and equipment costs down, while generating high-quality data. He likened TAN deployment in a manufacturing enterprise to building a WI-FI hot spot in a hotel, where end users need little more than standard laptop, antenna and access privileges to access the network.
The company declined to discuss how its products would fit into the TAN, saying it would be back in 90 days to provide those details. However, Stephenson alluded to a device that would deliver "standardized network services" incorporating LAN/WLAN connectivity, device management and discovery and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), among other services. The company has had dialogue with P&G, Wal-Mart Target, Kraft, Best Buy, among others, to ensure that its TAN architecture meets their rigorous RFID deployment needs, Stephenson said. He would not say if any of these companies were using Reva's products, noting that such a disclosure was premature.
Reva, he also noted, has contributed to standards work ongoing at EPCglobal and the International Standards Organization (ISO). He pointed to contributions Reva's made on the air protocol (EPC Gen2, ISO 18000-6C); reader-side protocol (SLRRP proposal with the Internet Engineering Task Force) and application connectivity (ALE, Web Services).
The variety of non-standard approaches to RFID coming at manufacturers from all angles -- applications vendors (whose products require different and often proprietary flavors of connectivity software), network and connectivity software players, as well as tag and reader vendors -- has created an opportunity for a company like Reva, analysts said, to help manufacturers centralize the management of RFID data as they push to integrate warehouse data with enterprise systems.
Building a network to synchronize, correlate and aggregate RFID in logic units should enable the entire supply chain to avoid the scattered design and scalability problems of first-generation RFID solutions, said Joel Conover, principal analyst of enterprise infrastructure at Current Analysis, Inc., a market research firm in Sterling, VA. As a startup, however, Reva will be challenged to drive the IT industry's compliance with standards, he noted. "Reva is taking a sound approach that was proven in WLAN market," Conover said. "The big challenge is gaining enough credibility to get the big guys to make compatible hardware."
Reva, moreover, hopes that TAN fills a void that application vendors such as SAP and Oracle will later latch on to. "Neither [company] wants to be talking to discrete readers," Stephenson said. "They do not have the expertise to operate hundreds or thousands of IP connected devices 24/7," he explained. "They want to be able to receive [RFID] data and be the system of record."
In building Reva, which currently employs 25 people (the majority in engineering) Stephenson said he was careful to bring on personnel with depth and breadth beyond tagging technology and readers. "We hired folks with networking, radio frequency, supply chain and data integration," he said.
For instance, co-founder and chief technical officer David J. Husak was previously the principal architect of the C-5 Network Processor at C-Port Corp., a company which he co-founded and sold to Motorola Corp. in May 2000. Husak was also the founding engineer and system architect at Synernetics Inc., an Ethernet and FDDI LAN switching company, which was sold to 3Com. Previously Husak developed LAN interface hardware at the network computing trendsetter Apollo Computer.
Meanwhile, Reva's engineering vice president, Mike Grady, joined the company from Chinook Communications, a start-up developing silicon based physical-layer data transmission technology, where he served as vice president of engineering
Prior to co-founding Reva, Stephenson was CEO and then chairman of Xedia Corp., a developer of Internet access equipment, which was acquired by Lucent Corp. in 1999. Stephenson is getting to practice what he preaches: he has taught entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor in Babson College's MBA program and has served on the boards of several venture-backed startups and industry consortia.
Reva's backers have also had the fair share of funding success. Charles River Ventures bankrolled companies such as edocs, Inc. a customer self-service and e-billing solutions that was recently acquired by Siebel in 2004; iPhrase Technologies a provider of enterprise information access software, and UPromise, a web-based business that enables families to save for their children's college education by shopping at participating online and offline stores. North Bridge Venture partners has funded companies such as Ascential Software, whose software enables businesses to integrate and analyze large volumes of data (recently acquired by IBM); SilverStream Software, which provides enterprise application development tools (acquired by Novell); SolidWorks, which offers parametric solids modeling software (sold to Dassault) and Wellfleet Corp. (which merged with another leading networking company -- Synaptics -- before being acquired by Nortel).
Reva's name means "new beginning" in Hindi, and was suggested by one of the company's PhD engineers, who hails from India, Stephenson said. "It has no significance other than it sounds nice ... and the URL was available," Stephenson explained, acknowledging that the name is also being used by an Indian crane company and a manufacturer of electric cars.