RFID Spending On The RiseRFID Spending On The Rise

RFID is poised to be the next big thing in corporate IT spending, according to a new Forrester Research brief.

According to senior analyst Christine Spivey Overby, 37 per cent of companies surveyed expect RFID deployments to increase over the next year. The biggest interest in RFID is in the consumer products and retail industries, which account for 31 per cent of the of the companies planning to increase their deployment..

However, RFID is not only a technology issue, and Spivey Overby found that the money to pay for implementation will come from sources outside of the IT budget. She notes that companies are increasing their IT budgets by 1.24 per cent, compared with an increase of 1.69 per cent in RFID spending. "For many companies, significant portions of RFID spending -- such as tag costs and warehouse re-engineering -- will come from operational budgets outside of IT," she writes.

Moreover, companies that already have substantial investments in supply chain management technologies are most likely to be ready to surf the RFID wave. "Companies that are increasing their RFID efforts are further along with technologies that can unlock RFID's value," Spivey Overby writes, noting that 70 per cent of the companies which are increasing their RFID spending have either piloted or deployed supply chain applications.