India's Wipro Wants Piece of RFID Market

Radio-frequency identification is going offshore. Indian IT services provider Wipro Technologies is launching an RFID concept store at its corporate campus in Bangalore in hopes of building expertise in the hot supply-chain technology.

The store will be equipped with RFID technology, including tags, readers, and related software, according to a statement issued by the company today. Wipro technicians will test a number of RFID scenarios at the store, including item-level tagging, stock maintenance, apparel tracking, and inventory tracing.

Among the customers Wipro will work with at the store is forest-products company Weyerhaeuser Co. Weyerhaeuser is looking at how it can use RFID technology to improve supply-chain efficiency, company officials said in a statement.

Wipro isn't the first offshore provider to enter the RFID market. In December, Indian services company Infosys Technologies unveiled its plans to start an RFID practice. Market researcher IDC predicts that spending by U.S. retailers on RFID will reach $1.3 billion by 2008. Wal-Mart, Target, and a few other retailers are requiring their product suppliers to begin adopting RFID to track cases and pallets of goods through the supply chain.