AutoID & Data Capture Blog

5G Edge Infrastructure Market Growing Rapidly Ahead of Standardization

Imaging Solutions – Applications Beyond the Retail POS

A fair amount has been written about how retail POS applications including mobile couponing and gift/ loyalty cards are driving growth in adoption of 2D Imagers. These solutions have also been deployed extensively across various other vertical markets for applications including:

  • BCBP (bar coded boarding pass) – Transportation:
    • Businesses in the Transportation vertical stand to benefit significantly from the move to bar coded boarding passes by enhancing operational efficiency, reducing labor cost savings and in effect, gearing up the industry (& its passengers) for the inevitable move to contactless technology.
    • IATA’s mandate requiring all its member carriers to migrate from mag-stripe to the 2D barcode standard for boarding passes by the end of 2010, is expected to lead to industry savings of around $1.5 billion a year, effective 2011.
  • Track and trace – Healthcare: 
    • In order to effectively challenge the ongoing issue of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, emerging country markets are mandating strict labeling regulations to enhance traceability over the entire supply chain – with 2D barcodes encoding unique product identification code, batch number, expiry date & serial number. This is driving significant demand for imaging solutions in these markets.
    • Additional advantages that enabling this feature offers the industry include enhanced QA/QC, Reverse Logistics and reduction in reimbursement fraud.
  • Identity management – Government:
    • This application is designed to help governments build comprehensive citizen databases, easing out the ID certificates and documentation services – for law enforcement, public safety and military purposes.
    • By integrating the imaging solution with biometrics, enterprises can ensure maximum level of security possible, using it to identify both items and people.

The robustness of the 2D platform – and rapidly falling price point - is enticing end-users enterprises to skip over the linear imager generation and move to the 2D imaging technology. The solutions’ share of the barcode scanner market ‘pie’ is expected to grow significantly over the next 5 years, with the technology also having consistently demonstrated its efficacy and versatility with vertical-specific application deployments.