Silicon Valley Indian Professionals Association (SIPA) invites you to our monthly event on March 06, 2004.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) promises to revolutionize the consumer goods/retail supply chain and other industries over the next several years. Press releases, news stories, and company announcements are appearing at an increasing pace, making it challenging to keep track of what's happening, and to understand what's important, and what's not.

The global market for radio frequency identification (RFID) devices was more than $1.26 billion in 2001, and is projected to grow 29% per year, to $7.25 billion in 2008. Insight forecasts that tagging will be well on its way to becoming commonplace within supply chains, including smaller retailers and suppliers, with an expected tag price of 1 to 2 cents. Is it Real or Hype? What is it all about?

Real-world applications for RFID technologies have been improving the efficiency and visibility of supply chains for over a decade. While the potential benefits are numerous and exciting, the roadmap to this vision is still being laid out.

The event is focused on understanding the RFID trends and help you answer the following questions about RFID:

- Who is successfully deploying RFID?
- What lessons have been learned?
- Why RFID now? What can be implemented today?
- Challenges and opportunities in RFID for SME?

Please come and listen to Industry veterans on the talk about the challenges and the opportunities that RFID presents:

Interesting reading on RFID:

RFID Tags - Big Brother in Small Package.
RFID Chips Are Here.

Vikram Verma, President and Chief Executive Officer of Savi Technology, has earned honors from the White House, World Economic Forum as well as prominent academic, business and technology institutions during a career marked by increasingly responsible executive positions at Savi since he joined the company in 1990.
Mr. Verma graduated with a B.S. degree from the Florida Institute of Technology at the top of his class in 1987, an M.S.E. degree from the University of Michigan in 1989, and an Advanced Engineer's degree from Stanford University in 1990, all in electrical engineering. In addition, he attended the executive management program for CEOs at Harvard Business School, the AEA Executive Institute at Stanford University, and the Financial Management Program at the University of California-Berkeley. Mr. Verma has been granted eight patents and has several other patents pending. In 1994, his DF/Tag product was recognized as the "Most Innovative Technology Developed by a Small Business" by the White House Office of Science and Technology. In 2002, the World Economic Forum named Mr. Verma one of 40 "Technology Pioneers for 2003." Prior to his current position, Mr. Verma was Vice President of Engineering, where he helped design and develop the company's product offerings, and Chief Operating Officer, where he helped negotiate the acquisition of Savi by Texas Instruments in 1995. In 1997, the unit was sold to Raytheon. In May 1999, Mr. Verma led the management buyout of Savi from Raytheon.

Naresh Batra, has more than 30 years experience in high technology (Semiconductors, Communications & Networking) -- in Design & Development, Marketing, P&L management and successful Business Start-Up. Mr. Batra has served as a member of the Board and consultant to Display Research Lab, Interim CEO of UptimeOne Inc from 1998-2000 and President and CEO of XaQti Corp. San Jose CA, a Gigabit Networking Chip company which he co-founded and sold to Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. in July 1999. Before XaQti, he was Vice President and General Manager, Multimedia Group at Sierra Semiconductor (now PMC Sierra) after five years as Vice President and General Manager at Brooktree Corp. (now Conexant), San Diego. He was part of the team which took Brooktree public. Before joining Brooktree, he spent 11 years at Texas Instruments, Dallas (1977-1988), in various Executive positions, most notably directing the Worldwide Linear Strategy under Tom Engibous, who is now Texas Instruments' Chairman, President & CEO. Naresh's career started at A.B. Dick Co. (now a division of GEC) as a Project Manager designing advanced office information products.
Naresh holds MSEE and MBA degrees. He is a member of the IEEE and also a registered professional engineer from the State of Illinois. From 1996-1998, he was Chairman, Scientific Advisory Committee of IMSC, USC Los Angeles. Naresh serves on the board of Withya Technologies, is a Partner in Sand Hill Angels LLC, a partner with Commence Technology Partners and a limited partner in Satwik Ventures LLC.

Vijay Sarathy is the Group Marketing Manager for Sun's RFID Infrastructure Solutions. In this role he is helping define and drive Sun's overall RFID strategy as it pertains to solutions for EPC and non-EPC applications. Just prior to this current role, Vijay was a Product Manager in the Java Marketing organization where he helped drive overall J2EE adoption and was responsible for J2EE integration technologies.
Vijay is a Mechanical/Industrial Engineer by training with 13+ years of experience with software technology. He has an MS from Texas A&M University and an MBA from Santa Clara University, CA.