Drug counterfeiting may cost the worldwide pharmaceutical industry more than US$30 billion annually. Radio frequency identification — RFID — seen as one way to lower that cost, has its own defining characteristics. Issues of drug counterfeiting and patient safety differentiate it from RFID in retail markets.

To minimize this wastage, and to raise the level of safety for patients, some companies are embracing RFID tagging of drug shipments at the item level. At least three major manufacturers — Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Purdue Pharma — have announced plans to tag their products.

Will companies use UHF or HF technology for item level tracking?

How is pharmaceutical tracking different from supply chain management?

How will this market grow over the next four years?

To learn more about the RFID life sciences market and how it may affect your business model now and in the future, please visit: The RFID Life Sciences Market.

Shakeout in the RFID Industry

ABI Research of Oyster Bay, New York, today released as part of its RFID Research Service a warning that the RFID software market will experience a shakeout in the next six to nine months. Despite the lion's share of attention tags and readers have historically received, is at the application layer where the collected data from RFID is used in an "organization's operational machinery" to actually create value. As hardware matures and deployments expand, end users are increasingly focusing on making good use of the data. "New initiatives are flying thick and fast," according to ABI.

Driven by increasing demand for software to make sense of the new RFID data, there will be general consolidation in the application space, including rollups and acquisitions. ABI's director of RFID and ubiquitous networks, Erik Michielsen, notes that there is movement into the RFID application space from a number of areas. Enterprise software behemoth SAP, for example, is adding capabilities to its software suite Netweaver that are typically found in the products of OATSystems, Acsis, Connecterra, Sun, and Globeranger. Conversely, OATSystems is an example of a company whose products are handling standard Netweaver functions, according to Michielsen. Some of the middleware players are also expanding their products beyond mere middleware interfacing and into data analytics, business intelligence, and automation networking.

Whether or not ABI's predicted shakeout occurs, expect the RFID application space to be the most dynamic area of RFID in the coming years. A shakeout would change the playing field in the short term, but the effects will probably be subsumed long term as so many new ideas, products, and companies make use of RFID data that today's fledging field will be seem nominal by comparison.

Read the full release at ABI Research

Microsoft Takes On RFID Data Management

Microsoft plans to ship the next version of its database and development tools in early November, and it's working on software to manage radio-frequency identification data that's due next year.

Senior VP Paul Flessner said Tuesday at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando, Fla., that SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 will ship the week of Nov. 7. The company is also working on software for use with Windows and SQL Server it says could smooth out problems companies are having loading data from RFID tags into databases, and making that data available to workers.

News : Information week