Feb 20, 2022I received a call last week from a manufacturing company that was looking for a systems integrator to install an RFID system to track finished inventory. This person—I'll call him Ted—said he had spoken to two firms, both of which had refused to take the job because he'd refused to deploy their software to run the RFID deployment. "I don't need their software," he told me. "We have an Oracle system already installed, and I want the RFID tag reads to trigger transactions in Oracle."
I've heard this same complaint from several people investigating RFID solutions, and I am sure there are many others that don't reach out to me and simply decide not to adopt RFID technology since they don't want to pay a systems integrator for software they simply do not need. This is slowing adoption of the technology.
Now, I know that there are many applications for which using RFID software to manage serialized data is necessary and makes good sense. I am not suggesting no one should ever use an integrator's solution. Far from it. But when it doesn't make sense, systems integrators should not require it.
I know some integrators will say that they need the recurring revenue to survive. But in some cases, I believe, it is investors who are pushing the software licensing model on RFID firms. I know of one company that launched into the market with innovative and exciding reader technology, only to have its investors force it to mutate into a software company so they could get the recurring revenue from seat licenses.
The problem for integrators and hardware firms is that there have not been enough deployments to generate a steady revenue stream that would allow them to grow. I've always taken the view that the industry—including RFID Journal—should do what it can to help companies deploy, because every deployment can lead to more deployments.
I chose to spend an hour on the phone with a company that is not a paid subscriber of RFID Journal, and that may not attend any of our events, because helping to create another success story helps the industry grow, which in the long term is good for RFID Journal. No systems integrator can take on a project for which it will lose money, but it seems to me that doing a job for a services-only fee should be viable and could lead to deployments for which RFID software is required.
I welcome feedback—either on or off the record—from systems integrators that can help me understand their situation better.
Mark Roberti is the founder and editor of RFID Journal.
