This article was originally published by RFID Update.
March 8, 2005—Microsoft is targeting early 2006 for the release of its RFID Service Platform, a middleware solution it has had planned for over a year. The application, designed to run on dual-processor machines, is being built on the .Net development platform with a tie-in to the company’s SQL Server flagship database product for data storage. Acknowledging the widely-held view that RFID solutions remain too expensive for most enterprises to implement profitably, Microsoft plans to price the RFID Service Platform lower than competing middleware solutions. The application will be available both as a stand-alone product and integrated in next year’s versions of Microsoft’s three leading ERP packages: Axapta, Navision, and Great Plains.
Early 2006 might seem like a very late release for a first-version middleware solution, especially given the fact that “middleware” is already becoming an overly-general term as companies working at this layer of the RFID ecosystem begin to distinguish betweeen edgeware and data processing applications. But remember: this is Microsoft we’re talking about, whose wildly successful modus operandi has historically been arriving late to the party but dominating by the end of the evening (think graphical user interfaces, web browsers, spreadsheets, word processing, etc.). Also keep in mind that RFID is just getting started. It is easy for those of us involved on a daily basis to lose site of just how nascent this space is. There is plenty of time for the current leaders to eventually lose ground and for those not yet playing, like Microsoft, to get in the game and still win big.
See a few more details at CNET News.com
