RFID NEWS
Text size:
T
T
T
Financial Consortium Publishes RFID Standards for IT Assets
The organization hopes to see the standards' adoption among all types of firms that maintain data centers and must track a large amount of IT equipment.
By Mary Catherine O'Connor
Dec. 18, 2008—The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), a New York-based organization comprising North American financial institutions, technology vendors, research groups and government agencies, has published a set of standards for implementing RFID-based systems to track IT assets within data centers.
Though the standards were set by the financial industry, the FSTC is encouraging their adoption among all types of firms that maintain data centers, and that must track large numbers of IT assets.
In July 2008, the consortium announced its intention to develop RFID asset-tracking specifications for banks (see Banking Group to Set RFID Roadmap), and kicked off this effort by hosting an open meeting for banks, RFID tag manufacturers and service providers, as well as makers of IT assets. At that point, some member banks were already undertaking efforts to track IT assets in their data centers by means of passive EPC Gen 2 tags. Earlier this year, Wells Fargo and Bank of America established RFID tracking systems in their respective data centers (see Wells Fargo Banks on RFID and Bank of America Deploys RFID in Data Centers), and—according to FSTC's chief of staff, John Fricke—so had Citibank. All three banks, Fricke says, follow practices spelled out in the newly published documents.
After that initial meeting in July, Fricke says, the special interest group FSTC formed to develop the RFID roadmap met weekly in order to establish requirements and guidelines on which all of the IT asset manufacturers, RFID vendors and banks could agree and find mutually beneficial. Later, at a meeting in Chicago this fall, the SIG met with a larger group that included several banks' IT asset suppliers, in order to address additional questions. After this meeting, says Fricke, "everybody seemed pleased, and we agreed to put out this [documentation]."
The FSTC has issued two documents that lay out the functional requirements and numbering scheme for tagging IT assets, both of which are available for download on the FSTC site. The numbering scheme for identifying IT assets is compatible with GS1's Global Individual Asset Identifier encoding scheme, which has also been incorporated into EPCglobal's RFID tag data standard.
Dec. 18, 2008—The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), a New York-based organization comprising North American financial institutions, technology vendors, research groups and government agencies, has published a set of standards for implementing RFID-based systems to track IT assets within data centers.
Though the standards were set by the financial industry, the FSTC is encouraging their adoption among all types of firms that maintain data centers, and that must track large numbers of IT assets.
In July 2008, the consortium announced its intention to develop RFID asset-tracking specifications for banks (see Banking Group to Set RFID Roadmap), and kicked off this effort by hosting an open meeting for banks, RFID tag manufacturers and service providers, as well as makers of IT assets. At that point, some member banks were already undertaking efforts to track IT assets in their data centers by means of passive EPC Gen 2 tags. Earlier this year, Wells Fargo and Bank of America established RFID tracking systems in their respective data centers (see Wells Fargo Banks on RFID and Bank of America Deploys RFID in Data Centers), and—according to FSTC's chief of staff, John Fricke—so had Citibank. All three banks, Fricke says, follow practices spelled out in the newly published documents.
After that initial meeting in July, Fricke says, the special interest group FSTC formed to develop the RFID roadmap met weekly in order to establish requirements and guidelines on which all of the IT asset manufacturers, RFID vendors and banks could agree and find mutually beneficial. Later, at a meeting in Chicago this fall, the SIG met with a larger group that included several banks' IT asset suppliers, in order to address additional questions. After this meeting, says Fricke, "everybody seemed pleased, and we agreed to put out this [documentation]."
The FSTC has issued two documents that lay out the functional requirements and numbering scheme for tagging IT assets, both of which are available for download on the FSTC site. The numbering scheme for identifying IT assets is compatible with GS1's Global Individual Asset Identifier encoding scheme, which has also been incorporated into EPCglobal's RFID tag data standard.
