- The IOTA Foundation and Zebra Technologies have entered into a cooperation to integrate the Tangle technology into the Zebra Savanna enterprise platform.
- Both partners have developed an application interface to store data in or retrieve data from the IOTA Tangle via a call.
With Zebra Technologies, the IOTA Foundation has succeeded in gaining another big name from the tech industry as a partner. In a webinar yesterday the IOTA Foundation and Zebra Technologies presented the goals of their cooperation. The RFID and barcode scanners developed by Zebra Technologies will be connected to the IOTA Tangle, as the IOTA Foundation announced on Twitter:
IOTA and ZebraTechnologies are working together to bring every scan in the supply chain onto the Tangle to facilitate traceability and collaboration.
Zebra Technologies is an international company with over 7,400 employees and more than 10,000 distribution partners and annual sales in 2018 of 4.22 billion USD. Founded in the United States, Zebra Technologies manufactures a variety of data acquisition and processing equipment and software. The company develops and sells RFID readers, barcode scanners, tablets, thermal barcode label and receipt printers, and RFID chip label printers, primarily used in the manufacturing supply chain, retail, healthcare and government.
IOTA Tangle will be integrated into Zebra’s Savanna solution
Specifically, Zebra Technology offers the Zebra Savanna cloud data platform, which provides application interfaces (APIs) to quickly and easily transform data, devices, products and processes into secure, scalable digital services. To this end, the company has developed a service called “Blockchain Traceability” to send an RFID or barcode scan to the blockchain with just one API call.
This is an “out-of-the-box solution” for companies, which is designed to track their products via the blockchain. For developers, a REST API call is sufficient to retrieve or store data from the blockchain. This “blockchain API” has now been extended with IOTA.
As Alex Fryer of Zebra explained, Zebra Technologies and the IOTA Foundation have been working in recent weeks to enable an RFID event to be sent directly into the IOTA Tangle through a single REST API call using Zebra Savanna, as well as another REST API call to retrieve data from the Tangle. Regarding the collaboration with IOTA and the potential, Fryer explained:
One of the big benefits of blockchain is the consistency of information and the fact that everyone can access it and that there is a complete level of trust and no manipulation of that data. And when it comes to RFID the fact that there is no scan involved, that there is no real human intervention involved to get that data onto the Tangle, this is complete zero-touch compliance within the supply chain. So that is very exciting which use cases this could open up. This is very new; we build the API here in our sandbox I think two weeks ago.
As Fryer announced, Zebra Technologies customers can already test the API via the developer portal. All they need is an RFID scanner. One of the first projects where the technology is being tested is the TradeMark East Africa project, where the IOTA Foundation will build an infrastructure for the exchange of data between local governments and companies in the region for the supply chain.
