EPC Changing the World in Three Arenas

Yes, [RFID and] EPC technologies will fundamentally change the world. Only time will reveal the specifics, but success in three EPC investment arenas will influence the future. In one arena, investments are made with the interest of individual enterprises as a primary consideration. In a second arena, investments are made to serve an industry by using a shared infrastructure. In a third arena, investments are made to provide uniform services to the global public.

There will be many payoffs, and some losses, in each of the three EPC investment arenas. The payoffs will accelerate to the extent investments in the three arenas are coordinated. Ken Traub is shaping and galvanizing standards (e.g., EPCIS) that will facilitate that coordination. Nobody has a crystal ball, but Ken has his finger on the pulse of EPC adoption. Ken and I spoke recently about the state of world-wide EPC adoption and this blog post is partly a reflection on my conversation with Ken.

Although complex by any measure, the first arena of enterprise-focused activity is an easier problem to define. Customer-premises-based or private-cloud solutions are a natural response to these enterprise-focused problems. IBM, SAP, and Axway, among others, are leveraging strategic competencies and making investments with emphasis in this first arena.

Relatively-speaking, it’s easier to define and respond to enterprise-oriented problems, but industry orientation provides the opportunity for additional benefits. Hosted and software-as-a-service solutions provide advantages for industry oriented solutions via neutral-party-information-sharing, shared cost of capital, and easier-to-manage risk profiles. TraceTracker’s GTNet and FSE’s GDSN pool provide examples of investment in this second arena in concert with the food and beverage community.

The third arena, uniform services for the public, envisions a day when the need to exchange information about RFID tags and EPCs is common and routine. In anticipation of this common need, an open-loop, general-purpose, publicly-accessible service is appropriate. VeriSign shares this vision and is committed to providing Object Naming Service (ONS) to connect interested parties with information about individual EPCs.

The players mentioned as examples above and many others are managing investments and dependencies in the three arenas. To enable and re-enforce their efforts, standards for EPCIS, EPC Discovery, GDSN, and ONS hold the promise for additional returns via increased interoperability among investments. Those leading the charge in the three arenas and those dedicated to standards are setting the stage that will change global productivity and fundamentally change the world.