Enterprises are constantly looking for ways to be more efficient — managing everything from plastic pallets, to servers, to automobile parts, to retail garments, to temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals. Xterprise, leveraging its deep expertise around Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, supply chain and lean enterprise best practices, and a range of Microsoft® technologies, is all about making that process far more efficient and utilizing assets more effectively. See. Understand. Execute.

According to Dean Frew, CEO and Founder, Xterprise believes maintaining competitive advantage today requires companies to have a precise, current, and insightful understanding of their business environment and the ability to leverage that knowledge to better collaborate, respond faster, and exert stronger control over their enterprise activities. The companies that are adopting this approach to business define what Xterprise calls the “High-Definition Enterprise” — process focused and executing in real time. A High-Definition Enterprise captures and uses granular, up to-the-moment data. It leverages advanced automation and analytic systems to translate that information into performance efficiencies, continual improvement, and measurable business value. Xterprise offers a suite of solutions for just this purpose that combines its advancements in RFID-enabled enterprise applications built on Microsoft BizTalk® 2006 R2 with the BizTalk RFID Framework.

The company was started because, as Frew says, “The world is driving toward everything having an identity in an enterprise, and moving toward doing data collection at any process point rather than wherever you can afford to have a person.” He cites Wal-Mart today as an example. Wal-Mart’s shipments today are full of cases of product that each have an electronic serial number and get unloaded off trucks, and rolled immediately into inventory, rather than waiting for an operator to barcode scan the product.

Explains Frew, “So identity and process-driven data collection are going to drive business applications moving forward. And we believe that the market definer is what we call this High-Definition Enterprise. We want to be the enterprise application and solution provider, and application provider for this enterprise. Customers are no longer satisfied with the status quo, they want things better, faster, cheaper, and the only way to do that is to get more granularity in real-time. Our motto is to ‘see, understand, and execute’ — helping enterprises do that at a whole different level of fidelity than they have ever done before.”

With this in mind, Frew says the company had to build its technology on the best platform available. In 2005, it evaluated platforms to build the next generation of its applications, looking at Oracle, Microsoft, Oat Systems, and IBM. Xterprise decided on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 because it provided the best combination of industry-leading support of EPC Software infrastructure, mobility application support, SAP, and other ERP integration capabilities at the lowest total cost of ownership. Perhaps most important were the Services-Oriented Architecture/Business Process Management (SOA/BPM) capabilities that would enable Xterprise to effectively build its line of business applications and convert its intellectual property into business solutions.

In 2007, Xterprise was selected to participate in the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Technology Adoption Program (TAP), where ISVs can use Microsoft products before they are commercially released. Xterprise says its TAP project went beyond proof of concept to an actual enterprise deployment for iGPS (intelligent Global Pooling Systems) — currently the second largest UHF RFID solution deployment in North America.

Frew explains that iGPS was formed by a group of pallet pool industry veterans. Many manufacturers and shippers today rent pallets from pooling companies as an attractive alternative to buying and managing pallet fleets, and pallet pooling is now a $14-billion global industry. To leverage the benefits of pooling and the power of automating tracking, iGPS created plastic pallets featuring embedded RFID tags. Using Xterprise’s Microsoft-based solution, these RFID-tagged pallets can be closely tracked as they flow through the supply chain — from pooling companies to product manufacturers to distribution centers, retail stores, and back.

When iGPS introduced its all-plastic pallet pool to the transportation industry, it needed a way to track and manage millions of valuable pallet assets in real time across its global supply chain. For this solution, iGPS is using Xterprise’s Clarity RTI (Re-Usable Transport Items) application, and Clarity Analytics, which is built using Micrsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Windows Server® 2003, Windows Mobile®, SQL Server® 2005, and the .NET Framework 2.0. The solution will scale to hundreds of locations, millions of pallets, and tens of millions of transactions by late 2008.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and member of the Startup Accelerator Program, Frew says, “We have been embraced positively by the field teams at Microsoft because we actually have a tool that can help them sell their application stacks.” Jim Caudill, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Xterprise, agrees, saying that they see  the relationship with Microsoft as both a technology and channel-to-market partnership.

Explains Caudill, “The BizTalk product was released in September (2007) in Taipei, where Dean joined the Microsoft team in the launch. We then participated in the North American worldwide launch and the European launches, as well as numerous regional launches. In the first 6 months after the launch, we pulled through a little more than $700,000 of Microsoft product licenses — just Microsoft software.”

Adds Frew, “Clarity has been a huge success for Xterprise, Microsoft, and other mutual eco-system partners. We made an all-out bet that this Microsoft technology was going to work, essentially betting our company on it. It is a very ambitious project, and we felt that the interaction with the product team in Redmond and the team in Hyderabad, we were on the right track, and it proved to be a very good bet.”

For the last several years, Xterprise’s revenue has grown well over 50 percent year-over-year. It says it is on-track to achieve almost 100 percent year-overyear growth in fiscal 2009.

Download Xterprise’s success story in PDF format.