CEO Letter: Unlocking Enterprise Use Cases with Gen2X
Impinj Gen2X speeds inventory, increases tag read range, declutters environments, protects consumers, inhibits label and item counterfeiting and reduces cost.
For nearly two decades, Impinj has stood at the forefront of RAIN RFID, helping visionary Fortune 500 enterprises solve tough operational challenges. For example, self-checkout and loss prevention at a visionary European retailer, loading and shipping accuracy at a major global logistics provider and food inventory at a leading grocery chain. Solving these challenges led us to develop key RAIN innovations – a solutions toolbox – that we call Impinj Gen2X.
Today, we are releasing Impinj Gen2X to the RAIN industry. Gen2X is an enhancement to the radio and logical layers of the RAIN (Gen2) industry communications standard that speeds inventory, increases tag read range, declutters the environment, protects consumers, inhibits label and item counterfeiting and reduces solution cost. As one of the contributors to Impinj Gen2X, I am personally thrilled by its release.
Always part of the plan
Back in 2004, as the Gen2 working group developed the RAIN standard, we knew we couldn’t anticipate the needs of every enterprise in every industry. So, we created a standard that incorporated those things we did know, while leaving the door open for solution providers to innovate on top of the standard. If the innovations proved broadly useful then future versions of the standard could add them. If features were narrowly useful or out-of-scope then they would remain the domain of individual solution providers.
Over the years Impinj developed many such innovations. Some made it into Gen2V2, standardized in 2014 and Gen2V3, in ISO standardization now. Some remained narrowly useful or out-of-scope. And some were works-in-progress that missed the standards-development timeline. Gen2X is a toolbox with our key innovations, some standardized and some not, that we use to solve enterprise challenges. Our goal in releasing Gen2X broadly to the industry is to accelerate RAIN adoption.
Seamless interoperation, available to all
In our experience, enterprises want to know (1) does Gen2X interoperate seamlessly with the RAIN standard and (2) is it available to all solution providers? The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second is we have already given Gen2X royalty-free to all leading reader manufacturers, including Zebra Technologies, and our Gen2X patents are included in our cross license with our primary endpoint IC competitor. Looking forward, if parts of Gen2X prove broadly useful then we will consider contributing them to the next version of the RAIN standard.
“As RAIN RFID becomes increasingly essential to leading global enterprises, Zebra and Impinj are driving innovations that deliver the item visibility those enterprises need,” said Joe White, chief product and solutions officer at Zebra Technologies. “Zebra, as a Gen2X licensee, plans to leverage Gen2X in our products and solutions. We look forward to the benefits Gen2X will have enhancing item visibility and creating operational success for our customers.”
Unlocking enterprise solutions today and tomorrow
At the most fundamental level, Gen2X either solves previously unsolvable use cases, reduces solution cost or both. For example, Gen2X reduces retail-inventory counting time, saving labor cost. It declutters conveyor-to-truck shipment loading, reducing costly misshipments. Its decluttering also improves retail loss prevention, allowing consumer self-checkout. It boosts dock-door directional accuracy, reducing costly shipping mistakes. It improves the readability of small, embedded tags or tags on hard-to-read items, reducing tag cost and enabling new use cases like food tagging. It addresses consumer privacy at point-of-sale. And Gen2X is not static – we continue adding new innovations to it. We are today focused on enterprise use cases, but tomorrow’s emphasis will be on consumer use cases, including consumer safety and item sustainability. And always on reducing solution cost.
I truly believe that RAIN will connect trillions of everyday items. Today, our industry isn’t even at the 1% point. Gen2X can, I believe, accelerate that path to trillions. So I invite every industry participant to use Gen2X, as we together connect every item in our everyday world. And to see Gen2X in action, visit the Impinj booth at NRF 2025 in January.
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Tuesday, December 3, 2024
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Diorio
Chief Executive Officer, Vice Chair, & Co-Founder
Chris Diorio is the CEO, vice chair, and co-founder at Impinj and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. He spearheaded the development of the RAIN RFID radio standard and cofounded the RAIN Alliance.
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