Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« Four Fundamentals of SOA; All Interelated | Main | Are SOA and BPM Really a Match Made in Heaven? » June 18, 2007How SOA Can Help Capture and Analyze RFID Data SOA approaches and offerings are increasingly incorporating “event-driven architecture,” in which processes are launched or redirected in response to specific cues from applications. One of the most compelling enablers of real-time enterprise is radio frequency identification (RFID), which can provide a broader, real-time picture of where products or transactions are at within the value chain. Industry experts agree that coordinating new data sources such as RFID presents new challenges and opportunities in the move to more of a real-time enterprise. A little while back, I had the opportunity to chat with Peggy Chen, product director for RFID and sensor-based services at Oracle. She explained that the key is in identifying and drilling down to the data that is of value to the business. Such adroit and targeted data management “does help optimize the data, as well as help alleviate the big scare out there that’s there’s going to be too much data,” “Part of it is being smart about your data, and knowing how to actually store and manage that.” RFID and other sensors help bridge the gap between the physical world and IT world, Chen related. “In a real-time business, managers need to be able to act on information in a more timely manner – not just the information we have today in data centers, but data about all products and assets. It’s all of this information together that builds the full picture, and turns it into insight and intelligence that’s going to help them make better decisions.” Daniel Linstedt, chief technology officer for Myers Holum Inc., cautions, however, that enterprises need to tread cautiously and deliberately with RFID-type technologies. “If your RFID is feeding data to your systems, every 20 seconds, or 10 seconds, or every time it moved, what’s the value of knowing that at the high level of the organization? Is there a competitive value to knowing that this component with an RFID tag has mixed from shelf A to shelf B? There may be certain points, data gates, where it’s important to know exactly where something is. But in between those points, it’s extraneous data, it’s information overload, unless it answers a specific business question.” Chris Clauss, director of Sensor Information Management at the IBM Software Group, was recently interviewed in Dr. Dobb's on the potential of using SOA to build high-performance applications that can capture and read RFID data. Clauss reports IBM has been working with a standards body called EPC Global, which has defined two Web services -- one around capturing and bringing events into a repository; and the second around query, to selectively draw back out RFID events to solve some problem. "What this allows us to do is it allows us to separate the data capture from the data usage, and to have a high velocity data repository for allowing me to use RFID events by filtering them," Clauss said. Clauss explains how such a tool would be applied in a business setting: "Let's say I'm using RFID in a factory to manufacture products and to ship products, and I have a certain application that's really only focused on shipping. That application can subscribe to only the shipping events and it can ignore and not get notified of any of the manufacturing events. So basically what we're again trying to do is use Web services and Services-Oriented Architecture to separate the RFID event capture from the RFID event usage in order to enable multiple applications to access the events, and we very much do this in a high-velocity manner so we want to treat every incoming event as a mission-critical event. We don't want to drop any events and we want to make sure that events can be gathered and used internally." The new EPC standard also enables enterprises to exchange sensor events with trading partners, Clauss said. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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