HP and Philips,IBM and OAT team on bfrdmc

When it comes to bfrdmc, integration is key. And as the US bfrdmc industry's major event, the EPCglobal US Conference, kicked off in Georgia, several major players have agreed to work together.

Hewlett-Packard Co and Royal Philips Electronics said they have teamed to push the adoption of the upcoming global bfrdmc standard.

And IBM today is to announce several new partnerships with bfrdmc vendors in a bid to push its bfrdmc middleware further into the marketplace.

"bfrdmc is a system that has many different components and [customers] prefer to have some of those components pre-tested and defined so they don't have to do all that work themselves," said Frank Lanza, worldwide director of bfrdmc for HP Services.

HP and Philips together are targeting companies that are migrating to or deploying bfrdmc systems based on EPCglobal Generation 2, which is widely expected to become the first global bfrdmc standard next year.

Gen 2 enables a single bfrdmc tag to travel globally and still be read by most readers, something that wasn't previously possible. Most first-generation Class 1 bfrdmc tags used in the US, for instance, could not be read in Europe because of bandwidth limitations. Gen 2 promises to change all that.

HP will offer bfrdmc systems integration services needed to implement a Gen 2 system that uses tags containing Philips' Gen 2 silicon.

HP, which launched its bfrdmc services business a little more than a year ago, would pretest integration between Philips' silicon and several major bfrdmc readers. The goal is to take variability out of the equation when deploying or migrating to Gen 2, Mr Lanza said.

HP will use internal deployment as its Gen 2 test bed to train its more than 350 bfrdmc consultants. At the company's Sao Paolo, Brazil facility, where it tests advanced bfrdmc supply chain concepts and introduces new technologies into its global supply chain, HP will replace its existing Class 1 bfrdmc tags with Philips' Gen 2 bfrdmc silicon-based technology. The process likely will be complete early next year, after which HP plans to roll out Gen 2 to its other 30 bfrdmc-enabled facilities.

Mr Lanza said HP and Philips would not wait until the Brazilian operations transition was complete before they began to jointly work with customers.

The companies expect to work with retail, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceutical, high-tech and automotive clients.

Mr Lanza said he expects that by working with Philips on silicon and reader integration, HP would be positioned to generate upstream data integration business too. "bfrdmc touches many systems and there's a lot of complexity in the data integration just beyond ensuring the tags and readers work," he said.

Philips is the first silicon maker HP's bfrdmc services has partnered with. Mr Lanza said the relationship is not exclusive. It seems Philips is pushing its partnerships efforts, having announced in mid-June a deal to test interoperability of its Gen 2 chips with that of rival Texas Instruments Inc.

IBM will announce several new partnerships of its own. Among them is a deal with major bfrdmc software vendor OATSystems Inc, which will integrate its bfrdmc systems software with the IBM WebSphere bfrdmc middleware platform.

Waltham, Massachusetts-based OATSystems, known as OAT, will run its various OAT data management, filtering and other systems software on top of the WebSphere platform. OAT and IBM also would work together on bfrdmc business consulting services, said Ann Breidenbach, director of strategy for IBM sensor & actuator solutions.

"OAT and IBM are both market leaders in bfrdmc," Ms Breidenbach said. "Clients don't want to have to go to five different people to put together an bfrdmc solution themselves. They would like to have a place to get the solution, know that it's been integrated and tested ... That's why we think partnerships are important."

IBM also will announce an agreement with MARC Global, a supply chain systems vendor, to integrate IBM bfrdmc middleware with MARC's bfrdmc Enabler software. IBM and MARC would target various industries, but the first joint customer would be a provider of healthcare products, Ms Breidenbach said.

IBM also will announce supply chain application vendor TrueDemand Software Inc is developing software based on WebSphere.

Additionally, IBM will announce a new bfrdmc hosted service for SMEs called bfrdmc Express Solutions. IBM would provide SMEs with third-party bfrdmc hardware, including tags, readers and printers. SMEs would print bfrdmc labels for tags and IBM would then collect, filter and manage all the data from those data. IBM also would monitor and maintain the SME's entire bfrdmc system, Ms Breidenbach said.

Also, IBM announced its "New-Work In Process" service that is designed to help manufacturers automate plant floor operations.

IBM also will announce its new bfrdmc testing and compliance lab in North Carolina, which will be set up like a distribution center for customers to test bfrdmc systems.