While various naysayers have tried to argue that RFID's time has come and gone, infrastructure player Reva Systems says the uptake for the technology is coming along quite nicely.

In an interview at Interop, Reva, whose software is designed to consolidate and make sense of the massive volumes of data streaming out of readers that can become overwhelming, says European retailer Metro has expanded its deployment and is now mandating that many of its suppliers move to pallet-level tagging by October of this year.

And Reva product-marketing director Peter Blair says that decision will accelerate the arrival of a key tipping point with RFID usage: While many companies around the world have been adopting RFID technology solely because big customers were mandating it, those companies and others are now discovering significant and unexpected value from these applications, Blair said.

It also was interesting to hear that RFID engagements continue to be connected with a variety of corporate entry points: Blair said that with Metro, the project was with the head of IT; at Hewlett-Packard, with a combination of IT and operations and supply chain; at Dow Corning, with plant engineering; at Wal-Mart, with IT; and with Sony Europe, via the logistics team. All of those roads eventually lead to deep IT engagements, Blair said, but I think the breadth of departments involved in such engagements shows the widespread potential of this dynamic technology.