An Encyclopedia of RFID Development & Middleware
Gordon Cook

For the past 12 years, Gordon Cook has written about every aspect of the commercial Internet. Detailed interviews with the leaders of the field have given him a body of knowledge of unique breadth and depth. Gordon has used that broad knowledge and contact base to develop a complete analysis of the commercial, political, business, system and technical issues surrounding the broad introduction of RFID technology into the Global Economy. You can read an expanded summary and extracts and obtain his book through his web-site at $450 per copy - please mention RFID Exchange on your order form - it helps to fund the ongoing development of this site!

Here is an introduction to the approach and some of the issues covered - the full index of contents is further down this page.

When we began this exploration last December, our only under standing of RF-ID was that these tags would be extraordinarily privacy invasive and that It would somehow have some extraordinary impacts of supply chains by enabling the rooting out of all manner of inefficiencies. In beginning our conversations with Mission Assurance we had no idea how unusual and atypical its approach was. We had simply asked a VC subscriber for assistance in finding out more about RF-ID. His response was to introduce us to Mission Assurance.

By January we were discovering that the field was in far more flux and far more complex than we suspected. Chapter 4 on Supply Chains examines the players and users in more depth. It examines the gamble taken by EPC Global and its alliance with VeriSign which looks to us like a misguided step - "EPC Global in the Midst of "Mithra versus Godzilla""

Under Stratton Sclavos VeriSign's goal has been to link up with Microsoft and cash in on every means of central control that it can grab from its NTIA granted monopoly over .com and .net. ZD Net on February 25, 2004 captured very nicely on of the jewels handed Verisign as a result of EPG Global's falling for the sales press described in detail in Chapter 4.

Imagine a directory service and data bank that manages and routes domain name traffic, RFID tag information, voice calls, and digital authentication services. VeriSign is on a mission to become the Internet infrastructure utility that everyone else plugs into. By 2010, VeriSign Chairman and CEO Stratton Sclavos hopes to have at least half of all voice and data network interactions passing through his company's services.

The company recently announced a pact with Microsoft to integrate its security services into Windows, and is making deals with major telecom carriers for its communications services. VeriSign also was hired by EPCglobal to run a new RFID-based directory, and the company just introduced the Open Authentication Reference Architecture (OATH), a proposed open framework for authenticating users and controlling access to corporate networks.

But, VeriSign's path to become a dominant Internet utility is not without significant roadblocks. Sclavos is at odds many of the Internet pioneers and governing bodies in pushing for a more commercialized Internet infrastructure. "A transition needs to occur, going from purely academic and public sector funded to something that is now a mix in between," Sclavos said in our interview. "The statistics are saying it's going commercial in a big way. It is the foundation for our economy in the next couple of decades. We are at that incredible pivotal point where we have to make a transition to commercial entities running this and having the ability to create innovative new products and get paid for them."

One of the disasters waiting to happen from Sclavos' actions is that a company that purports to be all about security and trust is aligning with the least secure operating system in existence under the guise of keeping the user happy. Users want convenience above security so that is what we will give them. Amazingly this came in the context of Sclavos warning that the bad guys are out there and going to harm the commercial Internet! Surely you jest, you are thinking.

Bringing things back to the subject at hand, what is sad is that EPC Global fell for VeriSign salesmanship. We point out in detail some of the alternatives that were not pursued and some of the possible consequences of the path chosen. While we refuse to predict with confidence, there is certainly the possibility that the Verisign embrace into which EPC Global wandered could become a major set back to the adoption of RF-ID technology.

How Does One Understand the Market for RF-ID in Supply chains and the Architectural Implications of Solutions Being Offered?

While as readers will see we have talked in great detail with Mission Assurance we tested their view of the world in interviews with Keith Dierkx and Brough Turner. Keith explains their use in transportation management. Dierkx points out some significant findings: He asks is RF-ID about the ability to acquire, secure, distribute and share information more effectively? But even before you make your judgment about architectural approaches to RF-ID you have to ask whether the corporate systems exist to use RF-ID information intelligently. And then management must ask: when I have all this data, how much of it is useful information that will actually allow me to improve my business processes. Brough Turner explains the difficulty of integrating RF-ID into supply chain software with existing ERP and web services based supply chain management systems for many companies built on bar code based technology and functioning well enough so that adding radio tags produces insufficient return on the investment to justify taking the step. Finally in Chapter Seven, after having considered Mission Assurance in great detail in Chapter Six, we interview Terry Retter of PricewaterhouseCoopers. We ask Terry's over all assessment of the field and solicit his comments in particular on what Mission Assurance is proposing to do. Can it be done? What is the market for it? We conclude by feeding back comments on Retter's assessment from Mission Assurance and offer a detailed tour of its architecture.

Why All the Emphasis on Mission Assurance?

In 12 years of publication we have never even come close to going into as much detail on a single company or technology as we do here with Mission Assurance. We have burrowed into them for several reasons. What they are offering is very very different from everyone else. We hate to trot out the tired old cliché of paradigm change but don't know how else to describe it. The majority of the text in this report is not the interviews but rather taken from eleven weeks of discussion in a private mail list of nearly 60 people. More than 30 actually wrote comments to the list. We used this forum to problem Mission Assurance's ideas that we put out for scrutiny to a panel of bright people. When we probed deeper, we got more detail and solid answers not brush offs. We have been probing for 8 weeks and have not run out of substantive answers from them. At the very end we put our conclusions in front of Terry Retter and asked him to judge.

What Wedge Greene and his comrades are proposing is an amazing and very complex distributed service grid based on underlying technologies of Java and Jini. It is a technology that not only passes data between corporations but also enables a highly tailorable form of distributed policy. It is very complex. Therefore the extreme detail we have gone into show what it does and how. It encompasses flows of information, that as far as we can ascertain, no one else is attempting to deal with. A major reason for this is that standard industry observers correctly say that corporations won't play with processes that force them to reveal and make really transparent to everyone their here-to-fore private business processes. This position has been predominant in the face of technology that if fully implemented could have major economic consequences. Mission Assurance is suggesting that its service grid is so highly tailorable that users can control who can see what information. The suggestion is that thus reassured users will adopt the system.

Sensing that there is a huge economic payoff lurking here, if the claims of Mission Assurance hold up, we have honed in on the subject more than ever before. We end this summary with the following assertions. Mission Assurance currently is a mainly a set of well thought out ideas arranged into an elaborate design for which funding is being sought. Currently we have no financial relationship whatsoever with Mission Assurance. They are not even subscribers. If in the future they offered us money in return for a license to use this March-May issue in the marketing education efforts, we would accept. However, we have not been for sale before and are not for sale now. And so far they have not offered anything for licensing rights.

They may fail to get funded. They may fail to build a working system. They may fail to come up with a viable business model. Because they have to be interested in their own success, we have made a point of seeking independent opinions. In addition to subjecting their claims to the scrutiny of our mail list, we have talked individually and at length with several of the people on the list. Can this be done? Are these folk full of hot air?

These people tell us that they think what Mission Assurance is proposing to do, can indeed be done. Therefore we conclude that they are proposing to do, as far as we have been able to ascertain, is feasible. We have concluded that it has been worth while to discuss their concepts at such length, because, no matter what the eventual outcome, it offers a very intriguing glimpse into what Moore's law and advances in radio technology make possible. If Mission Assurance doesn't succeed, it probably won't be too long before someone else does succeed with something similar. Finally these concepts appear to be highly useful in understanding how the use of RF-ID in supply chains could have consequences far beyond the more mundane issues of inventory taking and shipment tracking that mark the more simplistic discussion of the trade and national press.

Keith Dierkx expressed the issues very well: Is this monumental stampede about RF-ID really about RF-ID? Or is it about the ability to acquire, secure, distribute and share information more effectively? But even before you make your judgment about architectural approaches to RF-ID you have to ask whether the corporate systems exist to use RF-ID information intelligently. And then you must ask when you have all this data, how much of it is useful information that will actually allow yourself to improve your business processes? I would suggest that with RF-ID we may get re-leveraging of supply chain software solutions.

Mission Assurance shows one interesting way. We are sure it is not the only way.

Contents and Index: