Whitepaper: RFID Impact On The Enterprise

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is coming to many Enterprise networks.

By now you may have read articles about RFID technology or heard that Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense (DoD) are already mandating its use. It is also possible that RFID is being utilized within your own company. Leaders in many industries, government agencies and regulatory bodies are evaluating the technology, learning how it works, and thinking of ways it can be leveraged to solve important problems. RFID is fundamentally about automating the process of data capture, particularly object-descriptive data that cannot be efficiently captured today. Once RFID data about an object has been captured, it can be used internally by applications within the enterprise or communicated via networks to external applications at other enterprises.

Some of the "magic" of RFID is that the data associated with the object can be captured without human intervention or line-of-sight between the RFID reader and the object's tag. The ability of an RFID reader to record observations of hundreds of uniquely tagged objects per second creates myriad opportunities for businesses. Some of the RFID-enabled benefits being pursued by early adopters include improved retail product availability, reduced inventory levels, streamlined operations, automated audit trails, and a broad range of track-and-trace related applications. Additionally, RFID promises for many businesses the ability to transform and improve processes in ways that are too compelling to ignore.

According to experts in a diverse range of industries, RFID has the potential to become the most disruptive technology since the Internet. If your company is not deploying RFID today, it will likely consider doing so in the future. Whenever that time comes, there is something you should know: RFID will have a significant impact on your enterprise network.