'RFID has grown beyond my most optimistic estimates'

Does the rarified atmosphere of academia bring out innovation, or does it take the drive of an enterprise to transform blue-sky research into blueprints? Dr Sanjay Sarma, acknowledged as the father of RFID technology, would have a tough time answering that. Sarma is credited with co-founding the Auto ID center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he served as associate professor and research director of the Auto-ID Center till he joined OAT Systems as CTO last year. Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News gets his take on where RFID is headed.

It has been six years since RFID technology returned. How has the evolution of the technology been?
I am actually quite amazed at how far the entire industry has come these last few years-the technology has progressed beyond my most optimistic estimates. Retailers have stepped up, and many forward-thinking manufacturers have are doing excellent work with RFID. The only surprise is that, given the better-than-expected state of affairs, many companies are still taking a short-term view of the technology.

Why did you switch from academia to business?

I want to be close to the action, and OAT Systems is at the heart of the RFID action. I want OAT to enable companies to achieve the next generation of IT and automation-where the physical world and the information world are inseparably intertwined.

What are the plans for the OAT Systems development center in Bangalore?
We are strongly focused on product development and we expect the Bangalore center headcount to exceed that of the US R&D team some years down the line. We will be incrementally hiring and slowly we intend to move more development to India, not for the cost: it is the value of the talent that has brought us to Bangalore. A lot of offshore work in RFID is also happening. Our partnership with Infosys would help in deploying OAT Systems' RFID software and both companies would follow a joint go-to-market strategy. We also work with hardware vendors and tag manufacturers and want to be hardware agnostic.

Are RFID deployments really taking off as expected or is it mere hype?
RFID has certainly taken off. One does not get to hear about the implementation much. A lot of it is happening in Asia. There is also some reluctance in adopting new technology but this will soon change with more and more major retailers following Walmart's example and mandating RFID for their suppliers. One cannot postpone the inevitable. It has certainly taken off in the manufacturing sector and retail as well. Ranbaxy, for instance, has gone in for RFID at its Indian plant.

When will the tags cost less, and will item level tagging happen soon?
The cost of tags depends on the volume of adoption. If the tags are ordered in millions, it works out to around 20 cents a tag. It is all volume driven. Item level tagging will happen rapidly. Very soon, we will see RFID applications in fields like pharmaceuticals where they would be deployed to track down spurious drugs. We hear about a lot of counterfeit AIDS drugs, which can be life threatening. I'm sure verticals like the pharmaceutical industry would take it (item level tagging) up actively since it's a question of loss of life and health. The systems are not in place yet. Transportation would be another growth area.

What are the adoption challenges?
Frequency and wavelength issues have to be addressed since if you don't do it, businesses could be affected. Data interference is a problem. RFID tags have to coordinate so that they don't interfere at the same time. The doubts over privacy are valid and they need to be answered. But I'd like to stress that privacy concerns also stem from a lack of understanding.