PART ONE - March 5, 2008 – Anitha Krishnan is an RFID solution provider in Bangalore, India and a member of RFID Switchboard who agreed to talk with us. Today she shares how their young company was formed.

You described your company as "pioneers in RFID in India. How did your company first enter the market?

Krishnan: The story of our N-NET follows the route of a group of friends setting out on an entrepreneurial venture, buoyed by early successes in their experiments with this technology. All the guys came from the typical background of software engineering, where they found plenty of spare time on their hands, and used that constructively to learn more about RFID, a technology that fascinated them.

One of the early incentives for setting up this venture came by participating in Megabucks, a very prestigious, nation-wide annual business plan competition held by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. They get participation from all the leading engineering and B-schools in India. The business proposition they submitted, for setting up a venture to provide solutions in the RFID space, won them the first prize in the competition. This really acted as an impetus to formalize the proposition.

One of our founders, Mihir Mohan, also spearheaded the India RFID initiative of BEA, where he was earlier employed. At that time, coming from a software-intensive background, the focus was on development of a middleware that we could take to the market at much lower costs than the license fees charged by established players like IBM and BEA.

Now the focus has shifted to providing entire solutions, since clients typically want the entire solution in a package, right from selection of hardware to getting the system up and running for them.

Were you looking to implement in India or were you looking to build a product for export?

Krishnan: In the early days, the team spent about six months developing a middleware - Neo RF Development Platform - to compete with the standard middleware available in the market, from a cost perspective. This was aimed at the Indian market where adoption of RFID was, and still is, in the very early phases. We did not look at servicing the U.S. market, since this being a hardware-intensive technology, 'Outsourcing' of the typical kind did not come across as a viable option.

When we took the middleware to the market, we realized that it did not make sense for clients to purchase only one chunk of the entire RFID infrastructure. So we partnered with hardware vendors, and used our in-house expertise to develop customized software applications over the middleware layer. This now helps us in providing a packaged solution to our clients.

What kind of Indian businesses are spending on RFID implementations?

Krishnan: We get a lot of requests from all kinds of firms, small or large, garage shops and huge corporates; for quotations, proposals, datasheets and all kinds of information. But the ones that really seem intent on taking this information-gathering exercise to the next level of implementation are in the automotive and logistics and transportation sectors – things like vehicle tracking and parking lot management.

While there are several government initiatives as well, those take a longer time than others to be converted into actual implementation. There is some interest generated in the retail market as well, for supply chain management as well as for exploiting the technology for customized marketing and smart-shelf management. But again, it seems as if firms want to play it safe, and resort to applications that have been tried and tested in other parts of the world.

What trends do you see?

Krishnan: Another set of players focusing on RFID are the design houses, who have hitherto been designing hardware and providing solutions in contemporary technologies; things like barcode, and biometric. They are now looking to either incorporate RFID with their existing products – as in the case of biometric scanner manufacturers – or gradually phase out their existing product line and move entirely into the RFID space, as in the case of some barcode reader manufacturers.