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Sybase Inc. subsidiary iAnywhere announced Jan. 30 at the Global RFID ROI Summit in London new software to help RFID hardware vendors develop “smart” readers.
The radio-frequency identification Anywhere Appliance Edition is software that can be embedded on readers to help deploy advanced functionality for things like security and communication protocol support.
The Anywhere Appliance Edition technology stack breaks into several categories.
A security component allows manufacturers to provide secure access to the management functions of a reader using network authentication policies like LDAP and Active Directory, while a communication protocol support component enables readers to communicate using a variety of standard protocols.
It also allows the reader to control GPO (general purpose input/output) as well.
The Anywhere Appliance also provides an API [Application Protocol Interface] that lets business logic be executed on a reader—a key ability as more and more RFID data is proliferated.
“One of the goals is to push less data into a network,” said Martyn Mallick, director of product management at iAnywhere.
“A lot of readers will pass mass amounts of raw data onto middleware, and let [the middleware layer] deal with it. With this, the software can parse out some unwanted data at the reader level.”
Finally, a management component lets users control readers through a Web-based management console whereby users can automatically restore reader configurations.
An auto discovery capability lets users register new readers on the network automatically.
While the appliance is applicable for a single reader or a network of readers, integration with iAnwheres RFID Anywhere 2.0 lets users manage an RFID network across multiple sites, with a number of different RFID devices.
Separately, iAnywhere announced Jan. 30 that Applied Wireless Identification will embed RFID Anywhere Appliance Edition into its MPR 3014 CE readers.
“Hardware manufacturers have good strength in dealing with air protocols, and working with various interfaces they may encounter to support low level protocols,” said iAnywheres Mallick.
“But when it comes to software management, building networks, thats a challenge for them—they may not have the skills in house. This provides a software stack that will run on readers and provide advanced functionality.”