This year will mark another significant advancement down the road towards RFID's pervasiveness, but it won't be the "Year of RFID." Looking at analyst reports, you'll see that RFID is being implemented in a diverse set of applications. Deploying RFID for "compliance" and "mandate" initiatives has been replaced by deploying RFID for continuous improvement initiatives. Orders of RFID tags and readers are on the rise. R.W. Baird's October 2007 RFID report sums it up this way: "We are aware of tag orders exceeding one million units in some cases and reader orders in the 50- to 100-unit range. By way of comparison, last year 5 to 15 units was a good reader order, and tag orders exceeding 50,000 units were considered large."
In 2008, you can expect RFID's influence to expand. Asset-tracking applications will continue to be a key growth area. Retail supply chain and in-store retail applications will leverage RFID in new projects and increase its use as 2007 projects turn into deployments in 2008. And the pharmaceutical industry and homeland security will push for RFID as a technology that can deter counterfeiting and increase security.
Source: Integrated Solutions, http://www.integratedsolutionsmag.com