The bad vibes surrounding RFID, which stands for "radio frequency identification, "could stop a clock, including the giant Dali-esque sundial residing in the nightmares of suppliers pointing to 2005.  RFID technology uses low-powered radio transmitters to read data that is stored in tags embedded with chips. These tags carry unique ID code numbers, used to track inventory from loading dock to trucks and beyond.

What a neat idea. What a quick, efficient way to manage inventory real-time and to fine-tune the business operation's big picture based on what is made to what is shipped to what is damaged, stolen, or purchased. The Department of Defense and Wal-Mart think so. They're telling their hundreds of thousands of suppliers to be ready for 2005 with RFID tags.

But oh, there are bad vibes swirling around RFID. Let's sample a few:

	Analyst at Gartner calls RFID "one of the most over-hyped technologies we're talking about today."
	Early adopter in Germany says tag prices are higher than bar-code tech; and there's not much testing yet in scalability.
	Analyst at AMR Research thinks the 2005 supplier deadline by DoD and Wal-Mart for RFID tags is impractical, because RFID's  technology just ain't ripe.
	Analyst at VDC Research frets about suppliers having to spend massively to support the deadlines with little return.

At Washington, DC-based, Carlyle Venture Partners, however, which is part of The Carlyle Group,  the mood is all RFID: Wave politely to the fence-sitters, dear, but keep walking straight ahead. Brooke Coburn, who is managing director  focused on investments and buyouts in telecom and technology, tells it to Open straight: "We are certainly RFID enthusiasts." Coburn believes there's no way this won't be adopted by 2005. He says his venture capital firm has been aggressive in investing in RFID. 

He says we're talking about business realities. If you step away from RFID and look at broader problems in industries, you discover the RFID touch-point. All businesses seek greater and greater efficiencies. They will be interested in any technology that improves efficiency because better efficiency translates into better profitability. Retailing represents an instructive industry example. And Wal-Mart represents the compelling case in point.  "The U.S. retail industry is ripe for transformation," asserts Coburn, "and Wal-Mart is a great example." 

The super-efficient supply chain is the basis on which Wal-Mart competes. While Wal-Mart has unique scale and unique resources,  for other participants in the U.S. retail industry,  "trying to bring equivalent levels of efficiency in their supply chains is a key challenge, and technology-based solutions are going to become important in resolving that, particularly given how fragmented the supply chain has become."

As that chain moves offshore and further fragments, having supply-chain visibility becomes more challenging but also critical. Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas, wants to see what is happening in the supply chain in coastal  China and everything in-between. 

Realities for many participants in the retailing industry expose the gaps. "As you move into retail stores," says Coburn, "the technologies you see there are fairly mature and they tend to be point solutions. Electronic article surveillance, inventory, barcodes for checkout--none of these systems is integrated. If they are integrated, and if a lot of these applications can be collapsed into a common platform to share information across the system, they will drive higher levels of efficiency." 

Hold those thoughts. 

Flash over to the RFID vision. As a radio-based code,  the tags can be read from distances of 30 feet and can be read quickly. Eventually, a Wal-Mart store manager is going to know what is on the store floor and what's still in the back room. The clerks will know where every product is and will replenish shelves instantly. In-store scans as well as spot inventory checks will be done with a blink of an eye, delighting those who need to worry about loss prevention. "Blinks" and "instantly's" in retailing add up to dollars. How does $2B sound. 

Coburn says he's heard that number from one analyst, who says that Wal-Mart would be positioned to save $2B a year in operating costs through the RFID initiative, most of it in labor. It in turn becomes difficult not to see the longer view that, hitches aside, disadvantages to suppliers in not being  RFID-compliant might surpass the costs of meeting the 2005 deadlines from such formidable we-lead-others-follow procurers as the DoD and Wal-Mart.  

"As you look into the supply chain, there are step functions and RFID is a next-step function, " says Coburn. Simply stated, that function is to provide real-time visibility in inventory and manufacturing processes. Initially, with  warehouse visibility in shipping, receiving, and picking, Wal-Mart looks to make RFID its next step in the efficiency of its supply chain. (Wal-Mart is asking its top suppliers to be RFID-ready by 2005 and all suppliers at pallet and case levels to be RFID-ready by the end of 2006.) And when one speaks of next steps in extending RFID beyond inventory and manufacturing processes, talk of RFID gets controversial. 

In eventually pushing RFID down to the retail floor level, customers are worried that by stepping into a mall shop to buy a pair of jeans they will become targets for Big Brother. Standards promulgators are, however, installing a kill function in the RFID tags. "People are worried that the tags will have them tracked all over the place," says Coburn,  "but the consumer can elect at the point of sale to have the RFID tag killed, so that the technology becomes no more invasive to one's privacy than a bar code. There has been a lot of hue and cry over this, but as consumer advocates come to understand the 'kill' functionality, the hue and cry will go away."

Where does Linux figure into all this?

Those who have been around the IT marketplace longer than a weekend know that wherever there is a breaking tsunami there's a constellation of information- and support-givers  itching to help business users rise to the occasion.  A tour has been on the move between October through mid-November 'to a city near you,' in the form of a traveling RFID University, designed to help deployment-worried managers in retailing, manufacturing, to logistics understand the deployment landscape, including RFID system building blocks. Meanwhile, to grow awareness of RFID among decision-making business buyers of RFID technologies, a subscription Web service was launched last June describing itself as "the world's first on-line daily Web site devoted solely to RFID and its business applications." This coming January, the service, RFID Journal, is to launch a quarterly print magazine as well. 

Throughout such connecting paths,  the phrase 'open systems' will be heard more than once. Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense have thrown their weight behind the Electronic Product Code and technologies developed by the Auto-ID Center. The focus is on creating low-cost RFID tags and readers  and an open system for sharing data over the EPC Network. 

Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal, has, from the site's earliest days, been talking about the value of open systems in future development of  RFID. And speaking recently to Open,  Roberti says this about the RFID impact in the IT vendor marketplace:

"RFID should be seen as a platform--an extension of the Internet.  This is a dramatic change, and it is unlikely that established players with investments in established technologies will be the ones to comprehend how this technology can be used in new and innovative ways. Given the open nature of the Internet and the growing importance of Linux and other open source products (Apache servers) in that architecture, it's likely that the open source community will play an important role in developing the systems that will create value from RFID data."  

Also, in speaking to Open, Roberti calls attention to ThingMagic, Founded three years ago by five MIT graduates, ThingMagic is working with startups, Fortune 500s, and research consortia, providing custom product design, prototyping, and long-term RFID. Roberti reports how embedded Linux is being used in readers developed by ThingMagic and marketed by Tyco. "The operating system helps keep the cost of the readers down and provides an open architecture that allows for flexibility," he says. But it's too soon to say that Linux or any one system will be the mother ship for servers in RFID land. 

"I think it's inevitable that some companies will be developing systems based on  Linux, in order to manage the data at the server level," he states. "There will be intense competition, however, and it's by no means inevitable that Linux will emerge the winner." In fact, Roberti can see large companies like Sun, Microsoft, and SAP "wanting "to claim this layer as their own." It might well be the open source community that finds the answer to how to manage massive amounts of data coming from RFID tags and readers, he concludes, but "Nobody is going to find the answer until RFID is more widely used and we begin to generate the data loads.