RF Code Announces Platform for Tracking IT Assets

Cognizant, a provider of IT, consulting and business process outsourcing services, has deployed a system that utilizes passive tags attached to laptops to track when—and by which employees—the computers are brought into and out of a data center the company operates in India. However, Cognizant found that the tags were not being reliably read because uncontrollable factors, such as metal objects being carried in bags along with the laptops, were causing RF interference with the passive tags. Based on this, it decided to begin testing RF Code's active tags, interrogators and middleware for the laptop project. According to Hal Lavender, Cognizant's chief architect, if RF Code's hardware performs more reliably than the passive tags, Cognizant plans to uninstall the entire passive system—the tags used for the laptops and personnel ID badges, as well as the reading infrastructure and middleware—and swap it with RF Code's platform.

Lavender says Cognizant has also installed RF Code's rack-mounted reader and specialized IT asset tags in 42 server racks inside its Calcutta data center, along with the RF Code Zone Manager middleware. The firm uses its own integration software to pull the inventory data into its Oracle database used to track capital assets (as well as to generate reports for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance).

The tag is bonded to an adhesive plastic strip that is attached to a server.

Cognizant is acting as a partner to RF Code, offering its IT integration services to companies that want to deploy the RF Code hardware and middleware to track IT assets, but that require a third party to integrate the tracking and inventory data with whatever back-end reporting system the company is already using. Aside from integration into Oracle databases, Lavender says, Cognizant can also link the RFID data into Microsoft's BizTalk and many other enterprise software platforms.

The new IT offering reflects a new focus for RF Code, Lavender says. Founded in 1987, the company has developed active RFID asset tracking solutions for the health-care, pharmaceutical, retail, construction and industrial manufacturing markets.

The rack-mounted RF Code reader costs $995, Medford says, with the asset tags priced at $18.50 each. He notes that a large organization with a data center that houses 250 racks, with 30 IT assets to be tagged within each rack, can expect to spend $412,000 on hardware and software costs. That, he says, breaks down to $1,648 per rack, and $54.93 per device. But with IT assets replaced only once every three years, the monthly cost would be $1.53 per rack-mounted asset, spread over those three years.

Last week, Asure Software announced that its NetSimplicity division is now offering RF Code's IT asset-tracking hardware and middleware as part of its Visual Asset Management (VAM) product. VAM is a graphical software system designed to enable companies to track and monitor valuable assets.