By Richard Sebastian, Research Analyst, Automatic Identification - RFID, APAC

Milind has 15 years of experience in building global organizations around Information Technology. He has successfully built products leveraging his skills in engineering and management. He leads the QID team by providing strategic direction needed to design, develop and deploy the company's innovative products and solutions. He has experience in building offshore development centers and expertise in leveraging global efficiencies while developing products. Most recently, as a Director of Intelligroup, he built and led the largest practice in the company focused on providing technology solutions to global enterprises. He has sold and successfully managed large project implementations to a Fortune-500 customer base. He has delivered speeches and seminars at large technology conferences and has recently co-authored an MIT paper on RFID and disruptive innovation.

Milind holds a Bachelors in Computer Engineering, Masters of Science in Management and a Masters in Business Administration. He graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA as a MIT Sloan Fellow.

Milind (Milind Tavshikar): Based on our patent pending technology and products, QID provides customized and scalable solutions to unique business challenges. Traditionally companies in the RFID value chain are either a horizontal or vertical player. Hardware manufacturers who conduct horizontal marketing and sell either chips or devices to any interested party, and then there are software players including middleware developers that cater to a vertical niche and develop applications for that vertical. Interestingly, my study of the customer demand while I was carrying out my thesis at MIT clearly showed me that the customer was interested in neither one.

QID presents that intersection of horizontal and vertical providers to scalable markets with a unique need. We have a very broad offering that becomes necessary for solution deployment to become cost effective. Our products are complimentary to existing products, we leverage standards and we integrate existing technologies to ensure we are not reinventing the wheel, but making it operate better.

Obviously, we don't want to be everything to everybody. We have carefully built solution scenarios for a set of applications within selected industries. These are applications that can be most effectively delivered using our products and technology alone. This strategy keeps us focused and allows us to build a sustainable barrier of entry for our competitors.

An example could be a pick and place scenario in a large manufacturing setup. Ours is the only solution that has the capabilities of deploying a tag with a visual display on the bin indicating an item has to be picked up to assemble a tray for a particular bill of material. The reader mounted on the trolley is capable of not just lighting up the tags but also scanning barcodes/passive RFID tags on items being removed from the bins and put on trays. It's a unique and scalable solution for many manufacturing companies for that particular application.

We have developed such scenarios for Airlines, Manufacturing, Logistics, Energy and Retail industries.

Our approach provides the customer an opportunity to think out of the box and apply RFID to his most important challenge. Once this is done, a customer is more willing to invest in traditional RFID scenarios like track and trace.

Milind: AIM is our flagship reader. The first in its kind in the world that can be deployed across the spectrum of Automatic Identification and Data Collection or AIDC as we generally call it. One of the major issues in implementing RFID is the change in infrastructure needed over barcodes. We recognized early on that it may not be necessary to replace every barcode with an RFID tag, we decided to embrace barcodes and build on it rather than fighting the issue this industry was facing. Our reader is a combination of 1D, 2D barcodes, Passive GEN2 RFID and it reads writes to all Active RFID tags we make. A backend connectivity via various methods like WiFi, GSM/GPRS make is ideal for many field operations. It has a full functional handheld computer with a .NET API making it very easy to build applications around it. To top it all it has a GPS location tracking mechanism built in that now allows us to provide the location of every scan made. Every time we show this reader to a prospective customer, we have found them coming up with a unique usage for the device.

We have a very attractive pricing plan for the reader and it could easily become a de-facto standard for AIDC purposes in near future.

Our S4 tags are abbreviation for Smart, Secure, Simple Storage. As the name suggests, we can do a lot of smart things with the tag since it has a microcontroller built in it. Data on the tag as well as communication with the tag remains very secure, providing an answer to the much needed security aspect of RFID in general. These tags were built on the work done by our co-founder and Ex MIT Faculty, Dr Rory O'Connor who has been working on wireless sensor technologies for many years now. Various versions of the S4 are now available that cater to different applications.

Milind: Like I mentioned, our innovations were always targeted to build on existing technologies and play a complimentary role. This is the core design philosophy at QID. The S4 tag without batteries has its own value proposition and we believe there are application scenarios where it is the only solution. Take an example of precision forestry. This industry plants millions of trees each year and needs to track the history of the tree throughout its lifecycle starting from a seedling till it is cut for lumber. Numerous techniques starting from implanting a tiny chip on the stem to fixing metal plates have been tried. None giving the necessary solution. Each had its own disadvantages in terms of deployment. The S4 tag is a perfect fit. You simply attach it to a string in the nursery when the seedling is grown and start maintaining data for its life. The same tag is nailed on the trunk as the tree grows. A handheld keeps updating records and reports location of the tree whenever inspectors need to make updates. No batteries makes it so much more reliable, environment friendly, cheaper and amenable to a variety of form factors. It is the only solution we believe that will work for this scenario.

Another industry we are watching closely is the healthcare industry. There is a huge drive in the US for electronic health records. People generally perceive these records to be much more private than their bank records. We think we might be able to provide that key to the records in the hands of individuals owning those records, making it virtually impossible for anyone to obtain these records without the individual's knowledge. It might be a huge opportunity for us as well as leader in this space to create confidence in the users of such applications.

The market reception is very encouraging. Although I would submit that, like any other new innovation, it takes time for people to understand this and imagine the possibilities.

Milind: The state of this industry is very fragmented. Customers don't want to deal with a tag supplier and a reader supplier and a middleware supplier and a application developer and a systems integrator for implementing a solution. I think consolidation in this industry is inevitable. There will remain a few major players that can provide solutions by tuning their platforms.

For new entrants like QID the options are very limited. To do what we are doing takes a substantial amount of capital investment. This sector in general has been over invested in the early hype days of RFID. Most investors are now waiting for returns to be delivered. Due to this scenario, most new RFID companies tend to become software players and deploy hardware made by others hoping to bootstrap businesses.

We were lucky to be a late starter in many ways. We could look at the scenario and make wiser decisions. We decided to deploy the 'World is flat' philosophy. Out core IP and strategy remains in US, One of our partners moved to India where he heads our engineering teams and we engaged a Chinese manufacturing company to get the costs down. Our differentiator apart from the unique technologies in the reader and tag is also this ability to deliver so much in so less. Our low NRE and ability to make modifications in hardware or software without major costs is very valuable to customers. Especially when everyone in the value chain is selling cookie cutter solutions.

Milind: Our market focus for the past 6 months has been India and Asia Pacific. For a variety of reasons, one being we want to tackle the most difficult problem first! These regions are very price sensitive - we believe that if we can sell our solutions here and make money, we would end up creating a business model that will remain competitive anywhere on the face of earth. Also our R&D facilities are in this region, which makes turnaround for any customer request faster. This region is also a great place to implement pilots where people are willing to try out new scenarios. Being an US based organization with access to all the latest technologies and people in this space gives us an advantage over local service providers.

We see our growth coming from the US market in the long run. I think many US organizations have now tried RFID in some shape or form. The technology is not new. It's mostly an ROI argument now. Our plan is to partner with a few complimentary players in this market and provide a cost effective solution.

Milind: Well, I think passive RFID has led the show in terms of setting standards for this industry. I think similar efforts need to be made in the active RFID area that will make it easier in terms of cross operability. In an ideal scenario the underlying technology should be transparent to the user of the application. That's not currently the case. One growth area we see for us is the GPS/GSM location tags and we need to resolve some of the telecom related challenges for this to take off.

Milind: We have only recently completed our product portfolio. Now the whole focus shifts towards gaining market share. We would like to be a dominant player for the applications and markets we have chosen. Initially there might be many, since we have to keep the lights on – but eventually we will settle on a few where we have a number 1 or number 2 position.

We also have to ensure we build on our success. Our desire is to successfully develop and deploy pilots in India or Asia Pacific and then leverage that experience to deliver larger projects in the US. So far we have been successful at that and we will need to remain focused on that strategy in the coming days.

Milind: I think deep knowledge to all aspects of the solution is an absolute must. Customers no longer accept anything less. They expect us to understand the hardware, software as well as the application. I think it's reasonable. Flexibility is very high on that list. Each solution is slightly different, at least each customer wants to look at it this way. We have figured out a way to provide this flexibility without really making multiple product versions. We call is customer specific enhancements that are made and maintained by the customer. Mostly they are in software that is built around our hardware. I think this is critical.

Milind: We would like to establish ourselves as a company that deploys innovation in a cost effective and customized manner. I know these objectives conflict with each other by nature and my goal is to ensure we deliver that promise. Time and again I have heard from our customers that they need to see that happen. We don't really have a choice. We would want to work with global organizations that can champion innovation. The goal is to grow this business via organic growth as well as look at opportunities where M&A makes sense. There are plenty of opportunities out there.

Milind: QID's strength is in deploying innovative technologies in a flexible manner at an affordable price. We will continue to innovate based on what we see happening. Our in house R&D gives us an edge over others who buy and sell hardware. Our in house applications team gives us an advantage where we can tightly integrate applications with technology. Our global business model provides a unique benefit in terms of cost that no one in the industry has. These are unique strengths!