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Bala Sriram, product unit manager, RFID & Adapters group at Microsoft, is responsible for RFID strategy and product efforts in the company. The mission of the RFID group at Microsoft is to revolutionize business by connecting Microsoft applications to sensors as well as backend line-of-business applications via a single adapter model. The team is building platform technologies for connectivity between software systems and devices like RFID readers as well as Adapters to connect to the backend applications. Interestingly, both these efforts are completely owned and executed from the Microsoft India Development Center. In a discussion with Shipra Arora of Dataquest, Sriram provides an insight into the market dynamics shaping up the RFID landscape in India, while delving into why the software major is interested in the technology.

What is your take on Gartner's view that RFID technology and the business benefits it promises will not arrive with a big bang? Is RFID over-hyped then?
It is true that RFID will be adopted incrementally, just like many new technologies do. However, the benefits are real. The early adopter results bear this out. A leading retailer has reported 16% drop in Out-of-Stock levels since using RFID in their stores. We think RFID is past the hype stage now. Customers are looking for both soft and hard return on investments. 

The technology is definitely the need of the hour that will enable organizations support a better business model. In a customer centric business model, RFID technology is essential as customer requests can be handled in a relatively short period of time, with the touch of a button. This level of product accessibility results in better shopping experience, and greater savings for customers. For a retailer this means that they can collect information about their customers' purchasing trends and offer rewards targeted to those interests. RFID can identify a customer, call up an account history, and enable the retailer to provide value-added services to help create a personalized-store experience.

However, while purchasing this technology, one must remember that RFID will not help retailers sell more razors or bars of soap. Instead, the technology has the potential to redistribute market share and drive sales for different companies that sell razors and bars of soap. Early adopters will get a disproportionate share of the wealth, and the laggards will be the companies who suffer in terms of lost market share.

What are the market dynamics shaping the RFID landscape in India?
The RFID technology trend is moving towards developing more secure and easy to use applications that will further reduce the cost for an organization. However, emerging trends in RFID technology can be seen in various areas like alternative tag designs and packaging, and architecture tag designs and packaging.

One of the emerging trends on this front includes chipless designs to improve upon the physical limitations of radio frequency detection. As far as tag packaging is concerned, tag and antenna packaging designs will continue to push the envelope of creativity and ingenuity, much as has been done in the past. For sensory tags -tags integrated with sensors which monitor record and track all sorts of environmental conditions-the trend is emerging in the direction of coupling or combining of RFID tag technology with sensor technology in very small form factors.

Can you give an overview on the activities and the nature of work undertaken by the RFID group? What is MIDC's role?
The Microsoft RFID team's goal is to enable enterprises to improve their operating efficiencies by taking advantage of the emerging RFID and wireless sensors technology. Toward this objective, the team is building a comprehensive software platform that allows businesses to easily create, deploy, manage and integrate their existing business processes and ERP applications with RFID technology. The team has also built up a partner network across the globe that facilitates adoption of the Microsoft RFID Infrastructure by customers. The RFID platform, the Adapter framework and the Line of Business (LOB) adapters are being developed at the MIDC. The team has been working on these technologies since mid 2004. Today, the RFID group consists of 30 people of various software disciplines such as Development, Test Development, Program Management and User experience design.

RFID is currently quite challenging to deploy and manage. As a result, we are working with various customers in North America, Europe, China and India on RFID pilot projects. These pilots provide us invaluable feedback in making the product better suited to customer needs.

Microsoft has also set up a Microsoft RFID council-a private body to counter user concerns across the world. Based in the US, this council is working towards setting internationally acceptable technology standards to ensure convenience for Microsoft customers. This body addresses key challenges that customers are facing with respect to the adoption of RFID technology. The council now provides Microsoft with industry feedback on the RFID product strategy, so partners and customers are duly benefited. With such initiatives, we hope that Microsoft will be a catalyst in establishing broadly acceptable industry technology for RFID in our worldwide markets.

What are the key highlights of Microsoft's RFID infrastructure?
The Microsoft RFID Infrastructure is a robust, extensible platform with open APIs and tools to cost effectively build vertical solutions and configure intelligent event driven processes. It is an integrated platform that will enable customers and partners to capture sensor data through almost any device, translate the data into meaningful events and utilize it in LOB applications or custom solutions

The key purpose of the product is to be a platform that will connect RFID and sensor devices to business applications, provide a development environment and tools for building applications using sensor data, make data that is captured in the form of events meaningful and chain the events as event pipelines. It is also targeted to provide an adapter to BizTalk and open APIs that allow partners to easily connect the platform to the business applications. We expect most of our ISVs, including Microsoft Dynamic products such as Axapta, will embed this offering to RFID- enable their applications.

The Microsoft RFID Infrastructure is in Beta1 phase now. The early Technology Adopter Program (TAP) is also underway. The TAP brings together a customer, an ISV/SI partner and a hardware vendor on a customer driven scenario. This helps us get feedback to incorporate in the shipping version of the product. The Beta1 version supports devices from 6 leading RFID device vendors. The Beta1 addresses the needs of our partners and customers to build pilots and proof of concept implementations.

In line with the emerging trends how has the scope of RFID work evolved at Microsoft since the time the company started working on technology and what is your future roadmap?
The strategy of the RFID project at Microsoft has not changed since we started working on it. This is due to our diligent incubation efforts for this project and our overall adherence to Microsoft strategies. However, the scope keeps getting bigger, as we bring on more hardware partners, software vendors, systems integrators and customers to use the platform.

As far as the roadmap goes, we see that wireless sensors and active tags will be a key area of focus. Readers keep getting more powerful. A distributed RFID platform is required to take advantage of new generations of readers. We will also need to keep up with evolving RFID standards.

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