FOSTER CITY, Calif. - October 14, 2008 - "It's always been our goal as a company to listen to what our customers want and then innovate to provide it for them," says Tom Pavela, President and CEO, Omni-ID.
Among those things customers wanted are a bridge between barcodes and RFID; printable rigid tags, on-site and on demand; and a hanging tag for smaller assets. And in all cases, says Pavela, they wanted to use the Omni-ID Prox tag. Prox works on-metal, off-metal and near-metal, as well as in high-moisture environments and harsh environments, even submerged as attendees at RFID World saw; they were able to read a Prox tag submerged in a tank of tropical fish and gravel.
A universal tag required more universal utility, which Omni-ID set out to provide.
Omni-ID On Demand
As Pavela describes, customers wanted greater utility without another tag design, and using legacy printers. did not want to another tag with which to experiment, or expensive printer.
The solution, says Product Manager Paul Clarke, is "elegant in its simplicity"; separate the label (including the chip and decorative finish) from the plasmonic structure - the rigid, self-adhesive part, and which spaces the tag from the metal surface.
Omni-ID On Demand enables customers to print, encode, and deploy the tags using RFID printers they already own, then assemble the tag and plasmonic structure by hand or using a label applicator tool.
Further, Omni-ID designed the labels with enough space for graphics and barcodes, for companies which use both or are making the transition from one system to the other.
"I can't understate the benfits of that approach," says Clarke, "And the flexibility that end users now have. They can commission an initial batch of tags, for early employment, then commission new hardware as it enters the facility. The flexibility to do that, to commission tags on demand, is the strength of the solution."
OmniTether for small items
Some assets are simply too small to tag. As Pavela describes the request from data center customers, "They told us 'The [Omni-ID] Prox covers 90 percent of the assets we cover, but we want the extra 10 percent. Do you have anything we can hang'"
"What OmniTether allows them to do is tag that few percent of assets with minimal real estate, like routers and comm. Cards - assets without even enough room to stick a tag."
That few percent, in a large data center, can be an enormous number of tags. In its first week of offering, Omni-ID supplied 15,000 OmniTether tags to a financial institution.
"And it's the same tag," says Clarke, which is what customers required. RFID users increasingly demand simplicity and limited choices; users who were satisfied with Omni-ID Prox wanted the same capabilities and design in a hanging tag. The OmniTether design is a simple modification to Omni-ID Prox using a cable tie, and does not affect performance.
OmniTether is best suited for high-value IT asset management and other specialist applications. Omni-ID believes that OmniTether is the only solution available that offers the customer the ability to tag assets in harsh environments, working on and off metal and offering the highest readability in the presence of liquids. OmniTether in combination with Omni-ID Prox product is the first passive tag solution with the ability to identify and track any asset found in the data center-from blades and cables to routers-regardless of size.
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