Identiv Partnerships Show Growing Traction for Smart Labels, as Well as Convergence of Connected Label Technologies

In the past month, smart label specialist Identiv has announced three partnerships.

First, it announced a partnership with Tag-N-Trac, the cold chain solution provider primarily focused on the pharmaceutical supply chain. Tag-N-Trac’s specialism is its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform in which it aggregates signals from a wide range of devices and software systems to provide advanced supply chain analytics. Tag-N-Trac may also be known to some as a vertically-integrated solution provider, in that it manufactures its own devices—including access points, cellular devices, and smart labels. However, this has never been its core strength; while it has seen Bluetooth® smart labels for years as a critical enabler for targeting pharmaceutical supply chains, it is the lack of availability of devices on the market that led it to create its own. The partnership with Identiv aims to allow Tag-N-Trac to focus on its SaaS development, while enabling Identiv to focus on its own strength—namely the manufacture of smart labels.

Identiv has traditionally been strong in manufacturing Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) smart labels. On the Bluetooth® side, it has been partnered with Wiliot since 2022 when the pair announced that Identiv would manufacture an initial order of 25 million of Wiliot’s smart labels. However, it is Identiv’s second partnership announcement that will serve the relationship with Tag-N-Trac—namely the partnership with InPlay. InPlay manufactures low-cost and low-power Bluetooth® chips, and Identiv will leverage its IN100 NanoBeacon System-on-Chip (SoC) to manufacture active Bluetooth® smart labels, with planned availability at the end of 2025. This partnership gives Identiv an additional go-to-market model with Bluetooth® smart labels: while Wiliot’s products are tied to Wiliot’s data platform, Identiv is now able to offer standalone smart labels to serve customers with existing data platforms or solution partners (like Tag-N-Trac).

Identiv’s third partnership announcement was with ZATAP and Genuine Analytics for an end-to-end solution targeting wine authenticity and using Identiv’s Near Field Communication (NFC) labels. One of Identiv’s key markets is luxury goods, which explains the wine interest. The partnership is another example of the creation of an end-to-end solution, as with the Tag-N-Trac partnership.

There are a couple of interesting aspects to these partnerships. First among these is Identiv’s expansion of its turnkey solution partnerships. Turnkey solutions enable it to go to market with vertical market specialists and eliminates the complexity of buyers contracting separately with, and managing the integration of, multiple solution suppliers. The key benefit is increasing the ease with which customers can get a solution up and running, and meets the growing customer demand for turnkey solutions in the track & trace business. Identiv launched its platform bitse.io in 2022 to help meet this requirement, but has not seen great uptake and is not looking to push it hard: customers increasingly come with their own data platforms, or want to purchase off-the-shelf solutions from solution providers that come with their own specialist platforms. While some fully vertically-integrated solution providers exist, this model of smart label hardware specialists partnering with end market or use case solution specialists will continue to grow to meet the complex variations of each industry.

The second interesting aspect is the expansion of Identiv’s Bluetooth® smart label platform as a growth vector complementary to its UHF RFID and NFC business. Identiv sees strong demand for these products and notes significant Bluetooth® label-based projects in its pipeline, including in grocery logistics. The Bluetooth® label market has for the past few years been dominated by Wiliot and its passive and active smart labels, but there is an important uptick in the number of deployments and the number of solution providers in the past 12 months. While the promise of Bluetooth® smart labels has been touted for years, their performance, data carrying capabilities, backward network infrastructure compatibility, growing manufacturing stability, and—increasingly—their price make them suddenly more attractive.

Connected label suppliers like Identiv, Avery Dennison, and Beontag are paying particular attention because of their ability to meet new item-level identity and—crucially—sensing use cases for their customers. The expansion of these companies’ efforts to incorporate Bluetooth® labels highlights the convergence of track & trace technologies as suppliers offer broad enabling hardware platforms or toolsets for their partners and their customers. The availability of off-the-shelf Integrated Circuits (ICs) like InPlay’s, alongside the stability of manufacturing printed batteries for Bluetooth® labels, will also help proliferate the number of suppliers offering Bluetooth®-based solutions. While Wiliot has dominated, to date (as well as Reelables with its active Bluetooth® labels), the growing number of suppliers and form factors demonstrates broader commercial viability and will allow a growing number of use cases to be targeted.

One of the key takeaways is that the fight for item-level visibility is just beginning. While UHF RFID use cases in the upstream retail supply chain and outside of retail have always existed, there are a growing number of conversations around RFID as an item-level supply chain visibility technology, rather than as an inventory cycle counting technology—an important shift in the narrative. The growing interest in and ability to manufacture and sell Bluetooth® labels (and other technologies like LoRaWAN and cellular labels) also allows suppliers to target a wider range of item-level use cases, from commodity assets with RFID to high-value use cases with Bluetooth®.

As this happens, a growing emphasis is on software suppliers being able to make use of the large quantities of data and provide insights or automate processes. Turnkey solutions are key to selling and helping customers make sense of the large quantities of data generated. Some, such as Trackonomy, have seen huge success from being fully vertically integrated. Many others will rely on broadening their partner channels. Going forward, we should expect the Internet of Things (IoT) and RFID worlds, typically discussed separately, to come together and form part of a broad toolset of data carriers enabling solution providers to go after different use cases and end markets. Bridging this divide will allow for far more productive conversations and solutions compared to the point solutions frequently deployed today.

It is no surprise to see, in parallel with the expansion of Bluetooth® label trials and deployments in the past 12 months, growing numbers of conversations from the RFID ecosystem on how they should position themselves in relation to the concept of Ambient IoT. This has hitherto mostly been claimed as a term by Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) technology, both for theoretical (the lowest energy protocol) and practical (vast quantities of passive IoT tags deployed by Wiliot) reasons. However, the RFID ecosystem, as it comes into contact more with the IoT ecosystem, and as the most widely deployed wireless endpoint technology, is looking to take its place within Ambient IoT. This is not competition around claiming a term: instead, it is understanding how solution suppliers outside of RFID’s traditional niches (such as supply chain visibility platform, for instance) can break down siloed point solution thinking and provide the right, broad toolset of solutions to meet adopters’ digital transformation journeys. In other words, it is a question of convergence of technologies. This is the destination that Identiv, and others in the labeling space, are pushing toward.