Building on its intention to become a total RFID systems provider, RFID infrastructure vendor TAGSYS this week announced availability of the first of three products in a software suite called e-connectware that is designed to manage global RFID networks.
"Software was the missing piece in the TAGSYS portfolio," said Fred Kohout, the company's chief marketing officer, in an interview with Managing Automation. The e-connectware platform provides management and administrative tools for users to manage item-level RFID hardware components such as tags, readers, and antennas, all of which TAGSYS also markets. The new software also complements the vendor's other offerings, including RFID architecture and design services.
"As RFID deployments continue and grow, there's going to be scale out [in the complexity] of RFID networks. Companies need a way to manage this," Kohout said.
The e-connectware software, which is being rolled out in three releases, will be able to acknowledge different types of readers and remotely manage and administer RFID hardware infrastructure. Users of e-connectware also will be able to make adjustments to the network on the fly, ensure read rates, and perform fail-over and recovery procedures, the company said.
The three products in the e-connectware suite will be targeted to different customers' needs. The Essentials edition unveiled today provides intelligent management and monitoring of TAGSYS reader infrastructure at a local level with a single user interface. This version of the software is available immediately.
The Enterprise edition will provide remote management, administration, and control of TAGSYS reader infrastructure on a networked, multi-site basis, while the Global edition will provide remote management, administration, and control of a heterogeneous reader infrastructure on a networked, global level for businesses with mission-critical quality-of-service requirements. Both the Enterprise and Global versions are scheduled for availability starting in the second half of 2007, the company said.
Pricing for e-connectware is based on a site-license model, and includes unlimited reader support for each deployment. Each instance of e-connectware can support up to 10,000 RFID nodes (individual readers) without additional cost or reduced performance, Kohout said.
TAGSYS claims that e-connectware is unique in that the software's design is based on an open, distributed network architecture as opposed to a client-server model, meaning that it can support additional nodes without requiring additional servers to manage the data traffic.
"The idea was to push the computing power as close to the [hardware] as possible," Kohout explained.
There are approximately 15 TAGSYS customers currently in various stages of evaluation and implementation of e-connectware, Kohout said. The software is not targeted to any specific industry or vertical, according to the company, and customer interest will depend largely on the size of a business and the nature of its RFID network.
Without predicting any timelines regarding widespread RFID adoption in manufacturing industries, Kohout said simply that TAGSYS "likes [its] position and the demand signals" going forward. ARC Advisory Group's recently published study, "RFID in Manufacturing: Five Year Market Analysis and Forecast through 2011," (subscription required) states that continued growth in existing RFID applications such as work-in-progress (WIP) tracking and asset tracking are expected to drive healthy growth through the end of the decade.
The report goes on to say that "numerous opportunities exist for internal RFID applications to generate ROI for manufacturers within the typical 12- to 18-month period." Improvement in the efficiency of manufacturing operations, for example, was one of the most frequently cited internal applications listed in a related ARC user survey.
Beyond traditional track-and-trace applications, TAGSYS e-connectware can help manufacturers with regulatory and compliance requirements by meeting stringent performance, uptime, and scalability demands, Kohout said. In addition, TAGSYS envisions RFID data eventually being managed in the same way as a data and voice network.
"It's not just about making sure your [RFID] readers have a heartbeat," Kohout said.