Feb. 26, 2008 – Stephen Hull is the RFID Product manager at thermal printer manufacturer SATO America.

A couple of years ago, a printer salesman (not from SATO) told me that 99% of his sales were “RFID-ready” and only 1% RFID enabled. What trends do you see now?

We would agree that the vast majority of our sales, too, continue to be standard barcode printers which are RFID ready. However, we are experiencing growth with RFID enabled units; but again the majorities sold are for barcode only applications.

How would you characterize the market’s knowledge after the first wave of RFID hype and what some saw as resistance?

A great deal of the resistance which we saw in the first wave was due to the cost of RFID hardware and media, with no foreseen benefit to the supplier, only the retailer. Today hardware and, most importantly media supplies, have come down a great deal in price. Companies looking to implement RFID can actually find a real ROI in using the technology in their facilities. The knowledge of what RFID really can do has increased with time and the stabilization of products.

How is the Dept. of Defense compliance market?

It seemed most tagging occurring at the DoD’s DC’s rather than by government contractors.

We would agree that most of the business opportunity with regards to the DoD has been from the DoD itself, and not as much from their suppliers and contractors. For instance a very large printer hardware bid was introduced this past year by the DoD.

Are you disappointed, angry or is some positive sales indicator you see regarding the defense contracting market.

We have taken an approach not to focus the majority of our efforts on mandated RFID and to primarily target the closed loop and internal process RFID implementations. Overall we gain position in the true market growth of RFID.

Do you see RFID printer-encoders becoming commoditized yet? If not, how far are we from that happening?

It is certainly moving that direction. Most of the printer manufacturers have a stable RFID printer, and the distinguishable characteristics are not much different, if at all, from the normal barcode printers. Once this occurs however – the task of moving the data and doing something with it to benefit the user of the technology will be the sweet spot for manufacturers, solution providers and VAR’s.

What features are the main hooks of buying SATO printers with RFID capability over the competition?

The current SATO RFID printers were built with RFID in mind from the ground up, while our competition is just adapting with their current barcode products. This gives us an edge with the RFID characteristics inside of the printer and makes implementation use of new inlays much simpler that others in the market. The remote management features that are built into our printers are a great benefit to large scale implementations of RFID.