I just saw this article on applications for RFID (those nifty radio-based micro identity chips) from a major ERP vendor’s perspective. The relevant categories for “RFID deployment” were described by Krish Mantripragada, SAP, as:
1. Process automation: managing the processes involved in handling RFID-enabled goods. In other words, see BPM.
2. Track and Trace: in other words, CEP.
3. Analytics / decision support: RFID will generate lots of data to analyze, although you could also do that in real-time as well as run traditional BI and analytics techniques on them. The term “decision support” means rules technology, which of course you can also embed in your rule-driven CEP solution…
4. Application enrichment where the existance of RFID data triggers some behavior such as marketing, cross-sell etc: this is event driven and either event or data correlation, both well within the capabilities (and current usage) of CEP.
QED.
