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The U.S. Army Product Manager for Joint-Automatic Identification Technology (PM J-AIT) named four prime contractors for its RFID III contract earlier this year. The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts went to Savi Technology, Northrop Grumman Information Technology, Unisys and Systems & Processes Engineering Corporation (SPEC). The RFID-III contract enables DoD to migrate from a sole-source contract to a multi-vendor IDIQ contract," stated Lt. Col. Pat Burden, PM J-AIT. "This is a significant milestone for DoD in that this migration will not only give DoD and other federal agencies' customers best-value solutions at competitive prices, but it moves us to ISO 18000-7-compliant products, thus broadening interoperability with DoD and our coalition partners. We look forward to working with the RFID-III contractors."
The $429 million contract includes 433MHz active RFID hardware, software and engineering services, and calls for state-of-the-art active RFID products that provide "logistics tracking, locating and health monitoring of commodities and assets." The contract was established by the Army on behalf of all U.S. armed services. The four contractors will compete for orders from organizations supporting the DoD, U.S. Coast Guard, NATO, federal agencies, coalition partners and other foreign military sales.
The ten-year contract consists of a three-year base period; two one-year options for products, services and maintenance; and five one-year options for maintenance only. In addition, PM J-AIT will offer site surveys, installation, integration, implementation and training for turnkey active RFID solutions to participating agencies.
The RFID tags, which will be used to track cargo containers and other assets, will operate under the ISO 18000-7 standard, and will include tags that contain up to 512k of memory, as well as less expensive tags with nonreplaceable batteries.
Savi owns the patent on part of the technology in the 18000-7 standard, and the other vendors and subcontractors had to pay the company for a license to sell equipment based on the standard. Savi has supplied the DoD with its proprietary RFID equipment for a number of years under the previous RFID I and RFID II contracts, and helped build the In-Transit Visibility network, which is the world's largest active RFID-based cargo tracking system.
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