Sybase, a leading provider of enterprise infrastructure and mobile software, today announced the availability of RFID Enterprise 2.0, a comprehensive RFID data management and integration solution that enables companies to meet the design, deployment and integration challenges presented by enterprise-scale RFID deployments. In addition to device and network management capabilities, RFID Enterprise 2.0 provides a full-featured integrated development environment (IDE) supporting business process orchestration, rules and transformation, business activity monitoring and mobilization features such as alerts and notifications. "RFID deployments are moving from pilots and proof-of-concept projects to full production systems, and companies are finding scalability and manageability to be significant challenges," said Neil McGovern, director of Unwired Products for Sybase Information Technology Solutions Group. "Sybase RFID Enterprise 2.0 empowers companies to more effectively persist, integrate and analyze RFID data. It enables our customers to move beyond basic compliance goals, allowing them to better understand their core business processes and capture the strategic value of RFID." Many companies are deploying RFID in order to meet product tracking and traceability requirements mandated by large organizations and government agencies. Beyond meeting the short-term compliance goals, however, many early adopters are finding that data being collected by the RFID systems can also provide very interesting information about their business and the mission- critical processes that drive it. "Users need RFID insights -- not raw data. Providers with an intimate knowledge of a given business process are better able to re-engineer process steps, negotiate data sharing among trading partners, and design new application workflows," states Christine Spivey Overby, Principal Analyst with Forrester Research, in her September 2005 report "New Types of RFID Service Providers Emerge." RFID Enterprise 2.0 is designed to allow customers to go beyond the tactical goals of RFID projects and achieve strategic transformation of their business by providing the data services that allow them to integrate, analyze, manage and design their data and systems in a service-oriented manner. Sybase RFID Enterprise 2.0 leverages the company's market-leading business process management and integration technology, and includes: * Device grouping for improved management and scalability * Multi-protocol support -- which is carried through the product in its data simulation, data processing and data reporting areas -- provides for the decoding of tag data after reads and the encoding of data when printing and commissioning RFID tags * Eclipse-based IDE and core runtime engine for event routing, message transformation, service design, business process orchestration and business activity monitoring * High-performance, mission-critical database management system that includes on-disk encryption, smart partitions and patented query processing technology that has demonstrated a significant increase in performance, as well as enhanced support for unstructured data management and the ability to natively store and process XML documents RFID data becomes strategic when it can be integrated, managed and analyzed effectively in harmony with the rest of the data architecture. The first challenge is to deploy and manage the network in order to optimize data collection. Middleware built around the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is essential to integrating RFID data with existing systems and providing the design tools and runtime engines to provide business process design, management, orchestration and monitoring. Finally, the massive amount of data generated in RFID deployments requires a world-class database to be effectively persisted and analyzed. Sybase offers a complete RFID solution that meets all of these requirements. Sybase will demonstrate Sybase RFID Enterprise 2.0 at the RFID World Conference in Dallas, Texas, February 27-March 1, 2006 in booth #1422. Additionally, Sybase is a sponsor of the "RFID in Perishables and the Cold Chain" pre-show workshop on February 27th and will be presenting on "Evaluating RFID Functionality Data Capture, Management and Integration," and participating in the "Lessons Learned: RFID Implementations RFID in Produce" roundtable. Availability Sybase RFID Enterprise 2.0 is available today. For more information, or to place an order, please call 1-800-8-SYBASE or visit: its Web site .