DoD RFID Summit - Washington DC
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Sat, Feb 28, 2009
This week's report comes from Daniel Connolly who spent some time this week checking in on the DoD Summit down in Crystal City, VA.
The DOD RFID Summit took place outside of Washington DC last week. The Summit was designed to explore the progress of RFID implementations and examine RFID's future as a competitive advantage for the war fighter. There's no escaping the conclusion that interest in RFID is soaring within the DoD. It was reported there are 3,100 RFID locations deployed in 30 countries around the globe supporting all four branches (passive and active). Also present were members of Department of Homeland Security and Department of State which indicates interest is U.S. government wide.
Mr. David Dias, Chief of Asset Visibility for U.S. TRANSCOM was the keynote for the event and highlighted the DOD focus on RFID to provide war fighter support. He illuminated a seven-year global vision extending RFID throughout the DoD supply chain. Kathy Smith from the Office of Supply Chain Integration pinpointed this vision in three distinct steps: expansion of the requirement for tagging, expansion of the tools for implementation and expansion to the theater in the form of depots and customer sites.
On the policy side, there was the announcement that all of DOD (and one could presume the entirety of the federal government) would be migrating to ISO standard for RFID. This comes as no surprise to folks following the standard clsoely as DoD has signaled its interest in IPv6 as a data carrier for RFID.
While the show floor was vibrant with 57 exhibitors, end-users were in short supply. During the breakout sessions one could appreciate the diversity in the crowd as the presentations ran the gambit from, "this is a tag" to more sophisticated planning tools and use cases. This once again spoke to the growth of the space as there were quite a few attendees that were getting their education in this rising market. "I am here to become knowledgeable in what is sure to be the most disruptive technology since mobile communications," quoted one attendee.
In an effort to size the AIT market and market potential, the DoD reported on a survey with a sample size of 9,000 within the DoD community and contractors that yielded interesting data. Mary Ann Wagner from XIO reported that 38% of the respondents were currently not engaged in AIT in any way which shows the market is still in its "early adopter phase". A segment of the respondents, 25%, were proactively pursuing one AIT tactical engagement while 37% were pursuing multiple AIT tactical engagements. This is a stirring data point as it speaks to the enthusiasm with which end users embrace AIT technologies. This adoption comes once they achieve education on the benefits and realize how truly transformational the technologies, like RFID, can be. Harold Goldzung from ODIN technologies who was the principle data gathered for the report prior to his engagment with us commented that the repsondants were split into those "just kicking tires" to full-on adoption and very few were respondandts were in the middle. Either way it's clear that DoD like the Commercial world realizes the inevitability of RFID replacing much of the bar code infrastructure and is taking steps to get the war fighter future-ready, particularly as logistics get more complex and soldiers start to decrease in number.