RFID software revenues are set to increase at a compound annual growth rate of more than 20 percent through 2016, according to ABI Research.

"RFID is proving its value across a wide range of verticals, from automotive to retail to healthcare," says principal analyst Bill Arnold. "RFID tags and readers may capture real-time data, but it takes software packages to make that data useful to the organization. RFID-focused software revenue should approach $500m in 2016."

ABI Research sees this software as belonging to two classes: "Platform" and "Line of Business (LOB)." Platforms handle the raw information and hand it off to other relevant software systems such as accounting, reporting, or resource management systems. LOB software enables specific activities such as warehouse operations, inventory management, or other daily operational tasks, generally at a departmental level as opposed to the whole organization.

"The LOB software category is growing more rapidly overall," says Arnold. "It is becoming much easier to configure, and if matched with an appropriate RFID 'platform', many of the costly integration discussions of the past no longer apply. The software has to be both hardware- and technology-agnostic. Getting it to this level of application specificity has been challenging and has required intense, constant investment in enhancing the software's capabilities; all while average prices continue to decline."

For these reasons, most RFID software is produced by vendors focused exclusively on this market.

At present, North America is the largest regional market for RFID software; Asia Pacific follows some distance behind, with Europe the third-largest market.

Source: ABI Research