Active Identity
Edgeware designed for RFID Integrators

Active Identity started in 2009 in the Middle East, in Beirut, Lebanon as an RFID integrator/solution provider. While going through the development cycle, its founders saw a gap in mid-level offerings that were being offered for the RFID industry. The trend made them update their vision and the company started developing pure RFID edgeware designed for integrators. Their background in hardware knowledge in turn, made their hardware and software systems more in-tune with market needs. Active Identity soon developed an easy to tweak, flexible to change, and multi-setup factored solution titled, ‘Envoy.’ This allowed them to fill the gap in the market for mid-level offerings.

Through his interview with CIO Applications Magazine, George Khalil, CEO of Active Identity, tells us about how Envoy helps its users gather and manage RFID data in the most efficient manner possible.

Q1. What do you feel are the bottlenecks and challenges clients are facing with which Active Identity can help?

Earlier, physics, technology, and hardware aspects of RFID served as significant hurdles. People had a hard time to make their proof of concepts work. Now, most proofs of concept are succeeding, and we are getting stable hardware models with working corresponding simulations. The next hurdle for people is making sense of all the RFID reader gathered data and methods to integrate the readers efficiently. We find that our layer is becoming a more significant piece of the puzzle due to its wider adoption, wider deployment, and larger implementation. This layer has become a lot more important and critical to guarantee the success of an operation, especially for big roll outs. Our RFID edgeware is DB-less, programmable, and has allowed us to be in the right space where customers are starting to realize the scene.

Q2. Can you tell us about Envoy in detail? What sets it apart from its competition?

Envoy was built on a couple of key principles. We wanted a product that can support RFID technology's natural evolution and won't become obsolete with time. We believe RFID, like any other sensor, needs to integrate, automate, and effectively work with all other IoT sensors. We understand that every customer, every process is unique. So for any solution to work efficiently, some level of control needs to be in the customer's hands.

Based on the above rules, Envoy was created.

It's the only programmable, real-time, DB-less, RFID edgeware. Everything it does is in real-time between hardware infrastructure and software systems. Envoy offers extreme scalability by implementing a way where users can customize their activities; even create their activities. Its adaptability to implement change at any point in time makes it flexible, making a project's life-cycle a lot more accelerated.
Q3. What strategies does Active Identity deploy to swat the competition in the market? What, according to you, are the distinct features that Active Identity Offers?

We figured out that although everybody wants to use RFID for similar reasons, their systems and processes are different. So their ways to reach the goal are different. Thus, we separated our customers into three categories. First, are the customers that have it all. Big companies have whole systems and big software teams to handle data and just want a pure, scalable RFID middleware solution. For them, we offer Envoy, our core product. These customers love Envoy and its unique features of scalability and flexibility. Second, are people who have some pieces of the puzzle but don't have enough to leverage RFID data. For them, we offer Envoy plug-ins, which are small tools and interfaces which we provide to accelerate the development process. Third, are the ones who don't want to get involved with RFID technology development process, these customers just want a complete RFID solution, ready to use. We offer them Active Tracking, a cloud platform that covers the product life cycle from production to shipping to receiving.

Q4. Can you tell our readers about a key project of yours where Active Identity's products were applied, and what made them ideal for that application?

One interesting use-case that comes to mind is of Italika, an automotive manufacturer based in Mexico. They make special vehicles and wanted to leverage RFID to automate different processes with their SAP system. The specialty of this case is when we went there two years after implementation for a site visit, we found that they changed the design of their entire manufacturing line. They restructured things and changed their workflows and Envoy's integration with SAP without our knowledge. Their understanding of Envoy allowed them to do this without needing our help. This speaks of Envoy's scalability and complete control in the hand of the customer. Envoy is perfect for cases where the customer needs to change things at will.

Q5. Where do you see the evolution of the company down the line? What are Active Identity's future prospects?

We are focused on three main areas. First, we are building our vertical-specific partner matchup. We are announcing a partnership with the retail industry, for example. We worked with the industry to develop the Active Tracking Platform, which is built on top of Envoy. It is a complete cloud based RFID system designed to integrate with your system. So, if you don't want to get involved with any RFID R&D cycle, and would like things up and running quickly, we have this cloud system. It's an end-to-end platform from supplier to retail store that is off-the-shelf and makes things work. The second area is expanding our appliance offering. As we provide Envoy as an appliance, we are expanding it to meet different needs of our customers in different environments. The third is integrating RFID with IoT and blockchain. A lot of systems are already leveraging IoT and will integrate within blockchain architecture. We are focusing on incorporating RFID with IoT and being able to push the data on the blockchain as well.