Supply Insight

In my research on the RFID Middleware market, I came across a number of vendors that were new to me. In a series of articles, I will provide a short overview of these products. The fifth of these is Supply Insight, who provide a EPCGlobal compliant middleware solution.

Supply Insight was founded in 2004 as EPC Integrator; the naming changing to Supply Insight in 2005. Itis headquartered in Hamden, Conneticut, USA. They have Development office in Bangalore, India. Currently Supply Insight have partnershipe with a small number of hardware vendors that include: Brooks Automation, Intermec and MTI Witeless Edge Ltd. They also have ISV relationships with a number of lbel printing solution vendors including Seagul Scientific.

Supply Insight provides various RFID services to their customers including RFID assessment, RFID project management, enterprise integration, technical consulting and RFID implementation support.

The rPlatform consists of the following components:

• The rPlatform Adapter is an EPCglobal™ RP compliant RFID reader connectivity software that adapts compliant and non-compliant readers alike to EPCglobal standards. It uses a pluggable resource adapter to support a wide spectrum of readers – UHF, Gen2 UHF, HF, and even Wi-Fi and Zigbee. It is available standalone, embedded into hardware, or as part of the total platform.
• The EPCglobal™ ALE compliant rPlatform™ Analyzer collects, aggregates and filters RFID data provided by one or more Adapters. It is available standalone, embedded into hardware, or as part of the total platform.
• Enterprise Business Server, based on EPC-IS Enterprise Business Server, gathers data relevant to the business and stores it in a repository. It allows interaction with trading partners for value-added information exchange. It converts low level RFID events into high level business events using an event transformation engine. It also includes a BPEL based process designer and integration engine for enterprise connectivity.
• Visual Designer, based on EPCglobal specifications, allows for central design and configuration of RFID deployments. The configurations are designed using the visual designer can be deployed in any EPCglobal compliant engine.

rPlatform works with a number of well-known hardware vendors including Alien, AWID, Intermec, Motorola, Printronix, Serit, and Zebra.

Figure 1: rPlatform Component Architecture (Source Supply Insight)

Supply Insight have produced to industry solutions based on rPlatform:

• Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) for Healthcare – provides support for all uses of RFID in the Healthcare industry from patient care to asset tracking. It supports active, passive and Wi-Fi devices simultaneously showing last known or real-time location of assets.
• MandatePLUS – is described as “a one-stop solution for RFID mandate compliance”. It is a mix of hardware, software and services that includes RFID compliance server, RFID printers, readers, antennas, tags, consulting, training and support. The solution works by uploading and parsing a contract to extract data relevant to the production and shipping processes and then using this data to ensure accurate tagging, notification and shipment.
  Key findings
  In the opinion of Bloor Research the following represent the key facts of which prospective users should be aware:
• rPlatfrom has been developed on top of the EPCGlobal specifications for ALE and EPCIS.
• The product rums on Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Linux and requires either Oracle 8i and above or MySQL 5.0 or Postgres 8.x as it DBMS. In addition the product requires either JBoss 4.x, or BEA Weblogic 8.0 or IBM Websphere 5.x as it J2EE Application Server.
• Both industry solution based on rPlatform provide wide support to solve issues in the healthcare, retail and DoD sectors.