Cisco Systems and European Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Centre drive European business roll out of IP enabled RFID devices

Cisco Systems and the European RFID Centre today announced that Cisco will join the European RFID Centre to collaborate with European businesses in developing their RFID strategies. The RFID Centre, which officially opens on January 25th 2005, provides a showcase of RFID applications for European business delivering value through live demonstrations, educational services, networking events, and impartial advice .

The RFID Centre is based in Bracknell close to Heathrow airport and is backed by a range of technology partners including Microsoft, Intel and Cable & Wireless and has government support from the UK's Department of Trade and Industry.

"2004 was hailed as the year of the RFID pilot but many of these to date have been small scale, lacked the complexity of involving multiple stakeholders and have mainly focused on in-store applications. Cisco believes that in order to develop understanding, accurately measure and create a long-term RFID strategy, it is essential to use a converged IP network which is scalable to accommodate future complexity and volume of traffic, said Kaan Terzioglu, Managing Director, Technology Marketing Organisation, Cisco Systems EMEA. "RFID is the ultimate networked data
application and its success and speed of deployment will depend on a scalable intelligent network architecture."

"The RFID Centre is a permanent, independent venue for exhibiting and demonstrating a wide range of RFID related technologies and cross sector applications to help potential users identify opportunities and select solutions" said Ed Cowley, Director of the RFID Centre. "It will also act as a hub to link together all interested parties from government, academia, industry bodies, business and supplier communities to help spread best practice with regard to successful implementations. It will focus on operational, technical and business issues. We're not a standards body, but we can help by interpreting and explaining to the business community the likely business impact of technical standards."

Cisco will be supplying the wired and wireless network infrastructure to the RFID centre which RFID applications and devices can run over. The centre will also house six Cisco demonstration pods which will showcase RFID specific uses of the Cisco RFID Ready Network with partners. New routing solutions with embedded services and applications, such as the Integrated Services Router (ISR), launched in September 2004, will be included as they evolve in the development of the Intelligent Information Network 3-5 year strategy Cisco is helping to drive standards through EPCglobal, EPCGlobal is the standards body that leads the development of industry driven standard for the ePC Network to support the use of RFID. Mohsen Moazami, VP of Retail, Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group, is a member of the EPCglobal Board of Governors. In addition, Cisco participates in various EPCglobal Hardware and Software Action Groups (HAG, SAG).