The Dublin, California-based ISV, a full subsidiary of DBMS vendor Sybase Inc, launched the middleware for RFID networks in February this year. It is a .NET-based system that links the information gathered from RFID tags to business logic for supply chain logistics, security, and workflow functions.
RFID is still an emerging technology with a proliferation of protocols, frequencies, and tag types, said Steve Robb, senior director of marketing for the company’s XcelleNet product group. Our product supports different standards within the tags, he said.
Until now, RFID Anywhere has only been able to support one protocol per installation, something that will change with v2.0. We’ll be able to offer multi-protocol support within the same installation thanks to the inclusion of a software module called Data Protocol Processor, said Robb. There are about 20 to 25 commonly used protocols, including ones from ISO and the EPCglobal consortium, but some companies may also want their own custom tags for things like encryption, and we have to be able to handle those formats too.
The other area of significant improvement in RFID Anywhere v2.0 will be in management. We’re enabling single-console management in this release, together with the ability to group readers into categories and set default profiles, said Robb, such that if one device fails and plug in another, it will automatically take on the characteristics of the one it’s replacing.
He said there is a trend towards integration of RFID and mobile networking as the quickest means of getting data collected by the readers back to a company’s HQ. There are already mobile readers for use in highly distributed networks carrying our Ultralight database, and since data transmission is intermittent and low-speed, RFID Anywhere can sit on the device, he said, and with another product of ours called QAnywhere, you can queue the messages to go and provide guaranteed delivery whenever a connection is made.
