By Jo Best, 28 April 2005 00:05
NEWS Manufacturers in Europe and North America are finally getting turned on to RFID - but they're jumping rather than being pushed.
According to new research from Datamonitor, manufacturing execs are keen on the tracking technology and not because they're being forced to as a result of mandates from the likes of Wal-Mart.
With 60 per cent of manufacturers already under way with an RFID project, Datamonitor analyst and report author Richard Clifford said the sector is now unexpectedly sophisticated in its deployments.
"We were quite surprised by the level of advancement," he said. "There's still a fairly significant proportion focused on compliance with Wal-Mart and things like that... [but] a lot of the manufacturers we spoke to were looking to move it on a level beyond slap-and-ship."
Around ninety per cent of manufacturers said their next RFID project will be based around systems and data integration. Clifford added that the "immaturity of the technology and the immaturity of the standards" was the main inhibitor to adoption.
Manufacturers also listed ERP and CRM systems as key areas of tech spending for 2005.
Most of the technologies that won't be taking a slice of manufacturers IT budgets, however, are those creating most buzz in the industry - Linux, grid and utility computing.
Datamonitor found that 90 per cent of IT execs said grid was of no relevance anywhere in their product life cycles and 80 per cent say that utility computing is of no use in resource planning or supply chain execution.
Clifford said the lack of interest can be explained by vendor strategies - all too often vendors have been trying to push such technology on their novelty or 'Linux for Linux's sake', rather than selling it on the business benefits.
"[Such technologies] are not catching on because there's no dovetail there," he said. "Vendors need a rethink... putting less emphasis on the particular type of technology and more emphasis on solving the business problem."
The research surveyed IT decision makers from 150 of the top 300 manufacturers in Europe and North America.
Comments
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1. Lindsey Rockwell
"According to new research from Datamonitor, manufacturing execs"
How stupid. Never have I heard execs ever know what is going on before they get the quarterly report.
Some time ago, PC-magazine interviewd bank executives and most of them swore that they did not use Linux in any business critical process.
When the same reporter interviewd couple of sysadmins in those same banks, they told just the opposite. They suddenly had many applications running on Linux and other OSS products.
How can you actively participate in such a hypocracy? Your so called research is worth nothing as long as you never publish the questions asked, the population and of course answers.
Do you think people are stupid?
2. anonymous
Linux and Linux-based OSS solutions solve a crucial business problem just on their merits - I'm talking about the enormous TCO of Microsoft solutions. Regardless of what Microsoft may claim in it's 'Get the facts' marketing blitz, the relatively low reliability, poor security, low performance, poor scalability, and high cost of Microsoft solutions are all addressed by Linux+OSS products. Ignoring the 'Linux option', even if implemented for it's own sake, is perilous. Remember, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" is even less true than "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
3. Robert Halloran
Hmmm, the businesses here in the US that have jumped onto Linux are claiming speed to market, cost avoidance with server consolidation, ability to tune the code, and freedom from the MS upgrade treadmill. Doesn't sound much like "Linux for its own sake" to me...
4. Jav
More importantly is the fact that OSS is just that, open. This "irrelevance" is probably more due to incentives from vendors than anything else. The idea that there just isn't any really need for Linux shows a gross misunderstanding of the current technology market. Then again, manufacturing hasn't exactly ever been on the cutting edge. Most of their machinery may be, but their systems tend not to be. The funny thing is, they may very well be littered with embedded Linux in their bagging machines, assemblers, and line equipment already. They just need someone to come in and say, "What if you could yank data in a raw, open format and build your systems to read it now with no cost to a vendors DBA?" How "relevant" would that be?
<<JAV>>