Peter Zencke, board member and lead developer for SAP's Business ByDesign, announced earlier this year he would leave SAP at the end of 2009, but in a research note published Monday, AMR Research chief Bruce Richardson says Zencke plans to stay through the development of release 3.0 in 2010.
The announcement that Zencke would leave SAP followed my telephone conversation with him earlier this year during the Internet of Things conference in Zurich, Switzerland. In speaking with Zencke, it is clear companies are working toward building a services platform to support connecting a variety of electronic devices to the Internet and applications to mine the data. The problem, however, remains in developing the 0.1 cent radio frequency identification tag that makes it financially feasible.
Zencke says companies are getting close. The follow excerpt from the interview with Zencke provides insight into his view on the transformation of the Internet.
RFID World: What does 'Internet of Things' mean to you?
Zencke: I define it as the extension of the work we've done during the past five years in RFID. It is the smart items that have computing and communication abilities. It is the devices with sensors that provide real-world awareness for items making their way through the supply chain.
This extends to advanced manufacturing and automation control. We see many people in a variety of industries that have become aware of these technologies. Now they have begun to rethink the impact of these technologies on their business.
RFID World: What is the impact to SAP?
Zencke: We're talking about smart item infrastructure, Web services, and RFID. They all lead to the Internet of services. This is one of our four most important research focuses. We believe it's important to build a services platform to communicate with these smart items.
It's the more general area of business collaboration and semantic Web. And it is the area of SOA and services architectures. We think it all works together. If future generations of applications follow the paradigm of services-based architecture, not just services oriented architecture, then it will eliminate the barrier between the infrastructure in the physical world of automation and smart items and the infrastructure of software on the upper layer.
Today, the automation and the software run separate. The interface isn't based on standards, which is a big problem for many industries.
RFID World: How do you define the 'Internet of Things'?
Zencke: All the ideas integrating RFID are great, but the Internet of Things will take much longer to develop. So, we started a project with Wal-Mart and Auto-ID center. Worked closely with the Metro's Future Store in Germany and SAP Research founded a similar one in Switzerland. Big retailers know RFID is in their future for back-office functions, replenishment and sourcing products.
The popular discussion around RFID in retail continues has been around tagging individual items, but the industry still faces the same problem we had since day one, which is the price of the tag. It's still about 8-cents per tag. The price must get down to less than one-cent per tag. The good news is we can see the 0.1 cent tag in the future.
