"The integration work was laborious," Morrow recalls. "[But] the actual hardware pieces?once we got them tuned to read at the distance we wanted, which was two to three inches?were pretty straightforward to deploy."

Brett Kinsella, general manager of the supply chain management group for IT consultancy Sapient, says the type of RFID application will determine which enterprise system it will get hooked up to. For example, RFID at the pallet and case level will have to be linked to warehouse management systems. RFID at the item level will touch virtually every system from inventory management to replenishment to CRM systems. But because item-level tagging is still a ways off, few if any companies have given this level of integration?particularly with CRM systems?much thought. CIOs who have implemented an infrastructure for enterprise application integration are going to have the easiest time moving RFID data into existing enterprise systems, says Kinsella, "because they can look at this data as another node on their EAI servers."

RFID Architecture: Computing on the Edge

As companies deploy RFID technology, their enterprise architectures will become more distributed, says Sanjay Sarma, cofounder of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, the consortium developing the infrastructure to enable supply chain applications of RFID technology. Rather than using a data center at corporate headquarters to aggregate and process the avalanche of data that will be generated by items, cartons and cases being read throughout supply chains, that work will be done at the edges of the corporate network?on store shelves, at the point of sale, at loading docks and on forklifts. Sarma calls this distribution of intelligence and computing across a wider network "edge computing." The distributed architecture, he says, will help companies manage the data glut.

"If you take all that data [from RFID] and supply it to the home office, bandwidth explodes," says Sarma. "But if you distribute it outward, you reduce the bandwidth you need back to the home office. You reduce computing in the home office, and you make things [operate] much faster."

Part of this architecture?and the key to enabling RFID applications for retailers and manufacturers?are two technologies that Auto-ID, a partnership between nearly 100 global companies and five research universities, is developing: Savant and object name service (ONS). RFID readers will be wired into a computer system running Savant, an application that manages all the data going in and out of readers. The ONS matches the EPC to the address of a server, which contains information about the product. By calling up an IP address, the ONS essentially tells you what the EPC means, working in a similar manner to the way webpages are called up on the Internet.