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•Article: RFID Basics

Hype could only push RFID (radio frequency identification) so far. The real deployments are built on sound business cases and by leveraging partner expertise.

It's pretty easy to make the blanket claim that RFID technology has not lived up to the hype of the previous few years. The impact of compliance initiatives spearheaded by huge players, such as Wal-Mart and the DoD, has fallen short of expectations. Adoption rates and scaled deployments are inching up at a methodically slow pace. For a lot of industry technology vendors and observers, RFID appears to be the ‘hockey stick' that never happened.

All of this hand-wringing, however, misses a much broader reality: RFID continues to make great strides on many fronts in varied industries. The fanfare that accompanied the compliance initiatives was deserved, considering the companies involved. But, it's probably time to look at other measurements and markets to truly judge the current and future impact of RFID in the enterprise. "The RFID landscape is much more diverse than it was 9 or 12 months ago," relays Matt Ream, senior manager, RFID systems at Zebra Technologies. "The attention on RFID by enterprises is not just focused on compliance. Opportunities in WIP [work in process], asset tracking, and other closed-loop applications are all gaining mindshare. Compliance applications are still a very big component of overall RFID business. But, it's not the single driver."

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•Article: RFID Basics