Innovation Is Our Business

Intel has been at the forefront of the computer technology revolution for 35 years. The drive for innovation led us to create the world’s first microprocessor in 1971, and Intel continues to lead the way as the preeminent supplier of building blocks for the worldwide digital economy. The Intel product line includes CPUs, chipsets, boards, systems and software development tools, which together make up the primary building blocks for advanced computing, network, server and communications tools.

Intel’s Role in Sensor Solutions

The global business community demands increasing collaboration and integration both within organizations and with key business partners. Sophisticated sensor platforms such as RFID are at the heart of a new, collaborative revolution.

Intel sees the potential for business to evolve toward a more adaptive, organic model. Think of combining billions of sensors in intelligent, self-organizing networks, and you’re moving toward a digital “nervous system” that, like the human nervous system, can perceive and understand the world around us. RFID/sensor technology is the start of a global, collaborative system. This sensorbased network will dramatically increase the demands on your information architecture. Intel provides a powerful, scalable, standardsbased foundation to manage the massive amounts of data and the increasing number of applications making use of the data.

Creating the Future Through R&D and Standards Creation

With over 7,000 researchers and scientists employed in labs around the globe, our technology investments differentiate us from competitors and provide the foundation for future growth. In 2003 alone, Intel spent $4.4 billion on R&D. Intel is an industry innovation leader in the emerging RFID transformation. Working with academia and industry, Intel is helping to develop powerful, integrated RFID-EPC solutions using hardware and software based on robust, open standards and distributed computing architectures. In a collaborative effort with SAP and IBM, Intel is a key technology advisor in Metro Group’s Future Store Initiative, which has piloted the use of RFID-based inventory management. Intel is also a sponsor of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is working with EPCglobal to drive RFID standards. Intel has established RFID research laboratories in cooperation with the University of Washington; the University of California, Berkeley; MIT; and Cambridge University.

Service-Oriented Architecture

An effective approach to developing the information infrastructure for a robust RFID solution is a service-oriented architecture built on open-standards Web services. A service-oriented architecture can reduce environmental complexity and cost while increasing the flexibility and utility of IT infrastructure and information architecture.

To help maintain a comprehensive view of a solution using RFID and autonomic sensor networks, consider an emerging framework called the Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE). This framework can help you make sure you’re considering all the critical elements of a high-ROI RFID solution. SOE can assist you in developing a road map to robust, cost-effective RFID solutions that are compatible with existing legacy systems and flexible to meet changing business requirements and the evolution of the technology.

The service-oriented architecture layer replaces functional silos with networks of services. Software programs and data repositories are orchestrated as services, and are supported by distributed, automated security and management services. The SOA layer includes three important functions:

• Information access enables a real-time enterprise to harness information and become more flexible and adaptable to changing market conditions. This requires delivering the right information to the right person at the right time.
• Business process execution brings together a variety of functions and services to solve a specific business problem using adaptive business rules.
• The data hub enables the enterprise to encapsulate standard business definitions (for example, a “customer”) and to create others such as industry-specific definitions. The data hub also performs data cleansing operations so information can flow easily among applications.

The service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) layer orchestrates computing, network and storage resources and ensures that resources are made available as needed. Physical resources are virtualized to maximize reuse, reduce costs and make the infrastructure easier to maintain and refresh.

At the foundation of the SOE framework are innovative Intel technologies that provide core capabilities in computation, data storage, communication, virtualization, coordination, management and security that support the upper SOE layers.

Each building block integrates hardware facilities with encapsulating firmware that provides a virtualized, standardized interface to the upper layers of the infrastructure.

Recently, the company announced Intel® Active Management Technology, Multi-Core Technology and Intel® Virtualization Technology and a shift toward dual-core and many-core technologies. All are designed to make it simpler and less expensive to implement a serviceoriented infrastructure.

Platforms based on Intel technologies help organizations worldwide reduce their risks and operate with great productivity at low cost, whether the challenge is deploying service-oriented infrastructure, integrating disparate applications, running massive databases or providing convenient information access to employees on the go. As the cornerstone of a service-oriented enterprise, Intel® technologies give you robust, flexible and cost-effective infrastructure at every stage of RFID deployment. And Intel’s stable road maps continue to bring increases in performance and capabilities at a predictable cadence that minimizes disruptions. Information architecture must support the five critical activities required for RFID success:

• Capture information. Sensor-based information must be captured from a wide array of hardware platforms – readers, sensors, light stacks and more. Once the data is captured, it must be consolidated and filtered.
• Manage information. Sensor-based computing generates an explosion of data and events. The challenge comes in creating a consistent view of RFID data that is scalable, reliable and secure on a common, flexible infrastructure.
• Analyze information. Data and events must be analyzed in near real time to provide timely business intelligence and business activity monitoring for continuous process improvement.
• Access information. Incoming data needs to be made available throughout the supply network to trigger critical business processes. This includes providing the information internally to enterprise resource planning applications, and externally to trading partners and customers.
• Act on information and events. Organizations need the ability to manage by exception and respond to events triggered from anywhere along the value chain. Employees must be empowered to access, interpret and act on information when and where they need it.

Solutions Deployment Expertise: RFID in the Real-Time Real World

For businesses to meet the demands of global sourcing, intensive collaborative relationships and growth-oriented markets, sensor-based technologies are defining the path to survival, and business process definition is arguably the most important aspect of a high-ROI RFID solution. This is where you answer the crucial questions: What am I going to do with the RFID data? What business problems am I going to solve?

You might, for example, focus on reducing out-of-stocks or helping a business partner manage safety stock and replenishment. After you identify the business problems you hope to solve through the use of RFID data, the next step is to determine who needs to receive what data when and what events you want to act on. For example, to improve an out-of-stock and inventory management system, you would want to alert local store personnel and the appropriate business partner when items arrive in the store, then have the store personnel notify the head office and the business partner when the items are put on the shelf. If business process definitions are not clearly developed, you’re unlikely to realize RFID’s tremendous ROI potential.

RFID and other sensor-based computing initiatives promise transformative business value. They can transform a retail supply chain into a consumer-driven demand network and improve efficiencies and business processes in industries ranging from healthcare to defense.

Your company can realize greater RFID value by:

Responding to customers more effectively by building RFID solutions into your digital supply chain.

Business Value: React to changes in customer demand cycles, improve supply chain operations and better manage/track assets through real-time data captured via RFID solutions. Improve supply chain operations by enabling decision making to front-line employees – in the field, on location and on the road.

Intel‘s Role: Intel enables and delivers the distributed processors, compute model and IT infrastructure to support all the new data sources made possible by RFID, i.e., servers, desktops, mobile laptops, RFID readers and communications and networking products. Users and end users rely on Intel as a vendor-neutral and trusted solutions advisor to create real-world solutions for your business challenges.

Better capturing, analyzing and acting on real-time data – from customer info to product inventory – by integrating RFID and supporting IT infrastructure into your business process.

Business Value: Respond more readily to changing business opportunities for growth and business needs to remain competitive – marry new technologies with existing IT investments.

Intel‘s Role: Intel helps identify new directions and new computing models that will serve your evolving business needs. Intel’s mobility leadership, including powerful mobile platforms and emerging autonomic computing models (i.e., RFID) maximizes productivity.

Investigating and investing in RFID and other autonomic technology solution pilots, such as sensor nets and motes, for future business advantage, for compliance and beyond.

Business Value: Research the technology; a little investigation can pay big dividends. Determine if there is a process that would benefit from RFID, do a rough ROI analysis and if the indicators look positive, launch a pilot. Benchmark your current supply chain and critically evaluate if improved information about business levels, workflows and forecasting is needed. RFID could enable the next step change.

Intel‘s Role: Intel has formidable experience working with customers on RFID pilots and supporting industry standards, i.e., EPC Global.

With Intel’s standards-based distributed architecture and aggressive road map to continuing performance increases, you can optimize your enterprise RFID-EPC architecture’s performance, scalability, affordability and flexibility by building your end-to-end solutions on Intel processor-based platforms.

Widely recognized as one of the world’s most advanced manufacturers, Intel is reviewing best-known methods from around the world, as well as developing pilots to test the usage and value of RFID technologies and processes within our own high-volume manufacturing facilities. Intel is evaluating current practices and exploring RFID’s use to speed the flow of materials, enhance tracking and tracing and enable breakthrough improvements in manufacturing productivity. Meanwhile, the next steps are clear. RFID-EPC value arises from strategic vision and leadership, including a willingness to pursue new business models, to adopt global information standards and to invest in leading-edge technologies for data capture, information management and the underlying computing and communications infrastructure. Intel can help you join the sensor-based ecosystem.