Mar 14, 2012EPCglobal was established in late 2003 to commercialize the Electronic Product Code (EPC) technology and standards. The first chairman of the organization's board of governors was Dick Cantwell, who oversaw RFID efforts at Gillette and Procter & Gamble, and who is now the VP and global head of Cisco Systems' Retail, CPG, Transportation, Hospitality, Internet Business Solutions Group. After eight years of thoughtful leadership, Cantwell recently decided to step down, and Sanjay Sarma, the cofounder of EPCglobal's precursor, the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—and the man whom many have called the father of the EPC—was elected as EPCglobal's new chairman. Mike Rose, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems' VP of supply chain visibility, was elected vice-chairman (see RFID News Roundup: Sanjay Sarma, Mike Rose Elected to Lead EPCglobal Board).
RFID Journal's editor, Mark Roberti, spoke to Sarma shortly after his election.
Roberti: EPCglobal has been going through some structural changes, and is now being integrated more closely with GS1 than in the past. Can you talk about why?
Sarma: EPCglobal still exists as a legal entity, and it, in fact, has a new president, Paul Voordeckers. But its management is being integrated more closely with GS1 to take advantage of synergies across the two organizations. For example, EPCglobal standards development is being harmonized with GS1 standards practices, and as GS1 provides advice to its members on the use of auto-ID technologies, it can discuss the benefits of both bar codes and RFID.
EPCglobal is still developing standards. Nothing's changed in that respect. EPC standards remain at the heart of what we do, but we are grappling with other technologies. The board wants the organization to look at how EPC fits into the broader context of other technology trends, such as cloud computing. The focus is on bringing all of these technologies together to create visibility.
Roberti: EPCglobal has created high-frequency (HF) and ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) air-interface standards. The organization has created the standards for readers to interface with software, and for computers to share EPC data. Are there any new standards on the horizon?
Right now, we are doing all three. We are looking at the use cases and determining what, if any, new standards are needed. We are looking at cloud computing and NFC [Near Field Communication] and things like that, and determining how EPC might fit into those ecosystems. We are working on UHF Gen 2, Version 2, which is a significant enhancement to the existing standard, and will lead to a fairly substantial set of new features for passive UHF EPC systems. And, we are doing a lot of minor tweaks of the standards that are already created. The world changes, and the standards must evolve to be useful.
Roberti: The original plan was to have five classes of EPC tags, including active tags. Is that still the plan, and are you working toward an active EPC RFID standard?
Sarma: Dan Engels [then serving as Auto-ID Center's associate director, and now Revere Security's CTO], Roger Stewart [formerly Alien Technology's CTO, and now the president of Sourland Mountain Associates] and I wrote a white paper on the classes of tags, to help define what the original passive tag was and was not. But the world has changed since then on the active side, with Wi-Fi tags, Dash7 tags and other active-tag standards. On the passive side, there is a lot of interest in sensors, which have the potential to revolutionize the food and pharmaceutical supply chains.
Roberti: What are your thoughts regarding the future of EPCglobal and EPC standards as you transition into the chairmanship?
Sarma: There are massive trends in the technology space that are inescapable. One is ubiquitous computing. The second is the emergence of the cloud. The third is the advent of mobility. Mobile phones are reshaping the world. The EPCglobal board must look at how EPCglobal and its standards fit into this new environment. We have to help companies use EPC and these other technologies to connect to the consumer. It's a great time.
