SAP's RFID Focus for 2007: Object Event Repository Software

By Rhea Wessel

May 15, 2007—A top executive in SAP's RFID business says the software company has received a number of orders for its Object Event Repository (OER) database software, designed to aggregate RFID, sensor and other identification data. SAP expects to bring the OER to market at the end of the month, and to help its partners develop applications leveraging the software.

SAP, an enterprise software maker, announced the OER product in March (see SAP Introduces Software for Product Tracking), along with a related business application called Product Tracking and Authentication (PTA). Designed to allow companies to track and authenticate the serialized products they manufacture and distribute, such as RFID-tagged drugs, the PTA application uses data housed in the OER.

Krish Mantripragada, SAP

One of the first customers for PTA will be Novartis. The pharmaceutical company will use the software to track drugs from production to the pharmacy, as well as to keep records of each drug's handling and custody as it moves throughout the supply chain. According to Michael Lipton, SAP's director of RFID solution management, Novartis is implementing the project to comply with a California mandate to track such information electronically by January 2009.

Tobias Goetz, the manager in charge of business development for SAP's RFID products in Europe, says: "We have quite a filled pipeline from other industries as well [besides the pharmaceutical industry]." SAP has orders from companies in the automotive and high-end consumer goods sectors. However, he declines to reveal any customer names at this time. Goetz's comments were made during SAP's Sapphire conference, held this week in Vienna.

SAP's strategic RFID focus for the year will be to roll out the OER software and increase the number of users. As this number increases, feedback from customers will be incorporated to improve the software, in what SAP calls the "ramp-up" phase of the product launch. At the same time, says Krish Mantripragada, SAP's head of RFID and auto-ID solutions, SAP will support partners in the development of further business applications that can be run on the OER software using data collected via RFID.