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SAP's RFID Focus for 2007: Object Event Repository Software
Roadmap
SAP's basic RFID product, the Auto-ID Infrastructure (AII), allows users to integrate all automated communication and sensing devices, such as RFID interrogators and label printer-encoders or bar-code readers. AII has been on the market for several years, and in 2005, customers numbered about 135 in 15 countries. That number, according to Mantripragada, has since risen to 250 in 16 countries.
The spread across industries is changing for SAP's customer base, Mantripragada says, showing that RFID is being adopted more readily outside of the "traditional" RFID early-adopter sectors. In 2004, some 90 percent of SAP's RFID customers were in the consumer-goods industry. That number, he notes, is now down to 28 percent.
Since no single industry dominates SAP's customer base, the company has designed its product roadmap to be adaptable to many different customer scenarios. According to Mantripragada, the company's emphasis is on the capabilities and the platform, and SAP will continue to develop both the OER and the auto-ID infrastructure.
"We'll continue to invest in…the OER and AII," Mantripragada says, "to support the development of more localized applications, as well as enterprise applications. We can't build all the industry applications. Therefore, we are focusing on the OER."
SAP partners are currently developing applications able to run on the OER. Those partners include Infosys, which has a promotion execution and new product introduction solution called Pique, which has developed a warehouse management application; True Demand, a supply chain company; and Cognizant, a technology solutions provider.
Meanwhile, SAP is continuing its own development efforts. "On the platform front, we will continue to service-enable applications, making it a lot easier for our partners to take our capabilities, combine them with their own and create interesting applications," Mantripragada states, adding that on the solutions side, SAP will develop more supply chain applications for analyzing data collected via RFID.
"The general theme," Mantripragada says, "is that we have a lot of SAP applications that stand to benefit from serialized and RFID data. We will enable this as we see the market dynamics pick up."
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SAP's basic RFID product, the Auto-ID Infrastructure (AII), allows users to integrate all automated communication and sensing devices, such as RFID interrogators and label printer-encoders or bar-code readers. AII has been on the market for several years, and in 2005, customers numbered about 135 in 15 countries. That number, according to Mantripragada, has since risen to 250 in 16 countries.
The spread across industries is changing for SAP's customer base, Mantripragada says, showing that RFID is being adopted more readily outside of the "traditional" RFID early-adopter sectors. In 2004, some 90 percent of SAP's RFID customers were in the consumer-goods industry. That number, he notes, is now down to 28 percent.
Since no single industry dominates SAP's customer base, the company has designed its product roadmap to be adaptable to many different customer scenarios. According to Mantripragada, the company's emphasis is on the capabilities and the platform, and SAP will continue to develop both the OER and the auto-ID infrastructure.
"We'll continue to invest in…the OER and AII," Mantripragada says, "to support the development of more localized applications, as well as enterprise applications. We can't build all the industry applications. Therefore, we are focusing on the OER."
SAP partners are currently developing applications able to run on the OER. Those partners include Infosys, which has a promotion execution and new product introduction solution called Pique, which has developed a warehouse management application; True Demand, a supply chain company; and Cognizant, a technology solutions provider.
"The general theme," Mantripragada says, "is that we have a lot of SAP applications that stand to benefit from serialized and RFID data. We will enable this as we see the market dynamics pick up."
