Awakening the Sleeping Giant -IN
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Fri, Feb 13, 2009
Two weeks ago ODIN sent a cadre of folks down to Intermec's (IN) Global Conference in Orlando, FL. While the conference covers all of IN's technology from barcode scanners to services there was a lot of buzz around the "new' RFID strategy.
After the new CEO, Pat Byrne, had a chance to settle in (hired in July 2007) he apparently recognized RFID as a key growth market for the company and has taken an aggressive strategy. One thing is clear; IN missed the early wave of the growth and is in dire need to catch up with the three leaders in the market.
After getting the full report from our team, it looks like IN is poised to do more than catch up. They announced at the conference the hiring of a new GM to run the RFID business. He's a serial entrepreneur - Ray Cronin - who's HBS credentials and past successes (Azimuth was the last start-up he built up) would have outsiders believe IN is getting serious about RFID.
The new technology on display in Orlando was also indicative of a strong engineering effort over the past year. Both the fixed and mobile readers have much of the on-board horsepower to take RFID to the next level - particularly in a highly effective peer-to-peer architecture.
It will be an interesting race this year to see if the extensive distribution channel of VARs and resellers can latch onto an IN solution (not the hardware but a solution) and catapult them to the top of the RFID market. The existing client base is big enough to make that happen. IN will clearly have some tough competition from Moto who has been doubling their engineering efforts and has technology that at under $100 has the future potential to change the RFID market. Stay tuned on that.
ODIN was the first company to put the IF61s into production and have had them up and running for three months. We'll give details on performance and accuracy in future blogs as we gather more data. Talk to you next week.