As an asset tracking company clearly focused on enabling Bluetooth for continuous tracking and sensing, we did have a few questions about why we were at a RAIN RFID event!
In fact, we’re actually RAIN Alliance members.
The reason is pretty simple, we believe Bluetooth is not just complementary to RAIN RFID and Barcodes in asset tracking, but will deliver the most value when they can all cooperate within the same system.
RAIN RFID already does an exceptional job across retail, logistics and manufacturing, identifying items at scale as they pass a reader. But Bluetooth adds continuous location and condition monitoring for the assets that spend much of their lives away from those read points. We believe that if both technologies can work together, the result is a far more complete picture than either could provide on its own.
That belief is why we are part of the RAIN RFID community and why we were in Madrid last week for RAIN in Action 2026, the RAIN Alliance's annual gathering. What was really great for us is that we’re not the only ones who are driving to make this possible, across three days, speaker after speaker coming from their perspective rooted in RAIN RFID made the same case. Here is what stood out:
The idea of multiple technologies ran through the whole event, starting on the opening morning. Matthieu Picon, CEO of Tageos, gave a keynote on where the next 100 billion RAIN RFID tags will come from, with collaboration across the ecosystem as his central theme. One slide put it plainly: one strong ecosystem likely requires more than one single technology.
The diagram placed RAIN RFID at the centre with five complementary technologies around it, each given a distinct role. NFC engages and interacts, sensors sense and respond, visual recognition sees and understands, wireless IoT connects and integrates and Bluetooth Low Energy locates and monitors. As the subtitle puts it, the perception layer emerges when complementary technologies work together.
The same idea returned in the closing plenary. Karin Fabri, CMO of Tageos, opened the panel on the perception layer and physical AI by asking how machines will perceive, understand and ultimately act in the physical world. She noted how quickly RAIN RFID, NFC, Bluetooth, ambient IoT, sensing and optical technologies are all advancing, then framed the overarching question in a new way. Perhaps the question is no longer which technology is best. Instead it may be what each one uniquely contributes, how they complement one another and what becomes possible when AI can combine their signals.
Later in the panel, Le Liu of Qualcomm Technologies was asked where other technologies fit alongside RAIN RFID. She described them as complementary with some overlap and said she wouldn't expect any one technology to replace the others. For many applications, in her view, the best solution will need more than one.
Pierre Muller, RFID BU General Manager at Datalogic, made the same point in practical terms. NFC is the best option where you need trust in the tag and one-to-one interactions, RAIN RFID excels where you need fast and highly efficient inventory and technologies from the sensing world add more information about the tagged item. The technologies can overlap, with sensing a good example: RAIN RFID can handle it even though it isn't the technology's strongest point. The real question, he said, is whether one technology can support every use case or whether you need a combination.
Tancred Taylor, Principal Analyst at ABI Research, placed the same idea in a wider market context. RAIN RFID is already operating at a huge scale, with nearly 44 billion inlays shipped in 2025 and around 120 billion expected by 2031. In his view, however, the next phase is less about tag volumes and more about the role RAIN RFID plays inside the enterprise. He expects it to work increasingly alongside other sensing technologies. He was also clear that these should not be treated as competing approaches. Used together, they add context and fill the data gaps that RAIN RFID is less suited to solving, which increases the value of every technology involved.
Most of the speakers described the technologies as complementary. We would go a step further. The real value comes when they cooperate within the same system, sharing the same devices, the same data and the same business events. It was encouraging to hear the community moving in that direction because it is the reason we are members.
One other memorable talk came from Philip Leslie, CEO of Coriel, who was introduced by Leon de Ridder of Cisper. He opened with a deliberate provocation: on its own, a RAIN RFID read is worth nothing.
His point was that a read is only data. It tells you an identity, a time, a place and sometimes a condition, none of which a finance director will accept as a business outcome. Value only appears when the read becomes a business event that someone can act on, such as a pallet being completed, an item arriving or an asset leaving the site.
Rather than starting by asking where RFID fits, he suggested asking what happens today because you don't know. In most operations the answer is that people search, recount and check. Teams hold extra safety stock or ship and hope for the best while errors travel downstream, where they become more expensive to fix. That uncertainty has a real cost and it can be measured.
His formula for measuring it was deliberately simple: frequency × cost × achievable improvement = potential value. An error that happens 500 times a year at €100 a time, with an 80% improvement, is worth €40,000 on its own before you count anything else.
Tancred Taylor described the same shift from an analyst's perspective, with the question moving from where something is and how many you have to what should happen next, given everything you now know.
Philip also made the point that once the business event and the economics are clear, the technology choice becomes more honest. Sometimes the answer is RAIN RFID alone and sometimes it is RAIN RFID combined with other technologies. Occasionally the business case says not to deploy RAIN RFID at all, which he described as a good investment decision rather than a failure.
This is exactly how we think about asset tracking. A tag being seen by a device is not the point in itself, whether that tag uses RAIN RFID or Bluetooth. What matters is knowing that a returnable transport item has left a customer site, hasn't come back or has sat idle for longer than it should. When both technologies feed the same system, every read becomes another input into those business events and the picture becomes more complete. As Philip put it, the read on its own is still worth nothing. What you do next can be worth a great deal.
The Tageos keynote included a slide that showed what this combination can look like in practice. Under the heading "RAIN RFID & BLE", RAIN RFID tracked items on the shelf while a Bluetooth tag on a pallet in transit reported its temperature on the way from distribution to store. The caption described it as connecting item visibility with monitored supply chains.
RAIN RFID is exceptional at the moments when items pass a reader, whether that is a dock door, a tunnel or a handheld sweep. Thursday's supply chain sessions were full of end users describing what happens in between those moments and how they have set about closing the gaps.
Tendam and PAL Robotics described a familiar problem inside the distribution centre. Tunnels at inbound and outbound show what arrives and what leaves without showing what happens to stock in between. Their answer is an autonomous robot that scans the warehouse overnight, covering around 2,500 m² and 10,000 locations each night and recovering 87.7% of the units the warehouse system sent it to find.
UPS described the gap between a customer printing a label and the parcel's first scan at a hub, which used to leave 24 to 36 hours without any data. Cellular-enabled printers now publish a pick-up event for RFID-tagged parcels and fill that gap.
Bundle's laundry customer, meanwhile, used to lose all visibility once linen left the laundry. Read points at an unmanned hub now start and stop a rental clock as customers collect and return linen, which has cut the average time linen spends with a customer from 29 days to 14.
Christie Lites captures around 70% of returned equipment automatically with fixed readers and the rest with handhelds to reach a 99.5% read rate, with locating assets by signal strength as their next step.
Each of these organisations closed the gap in the same way, by adding another read point in the form of a robot, a printer, a hub or a handheld. Where you control the environment, that approach works extremely well.
Not every gap sits in an environment you control, however. A returnable transport item spends most of its life between sites and installing readers everywhere it might go probably isn't practical. This is where the two technologies start to cooperate. A Bluetooth tag can be detected from a distance by the phones and mobile computers people already carry, which turns the frontline into a network of read points that moves with the work. RAIN RFID tells you exactly what happened at a read point and Bluetooth helps fill in the journey between. That is the combination the Tageos slide described, with RAIN RFID and Bluetooth working within the same system each covering the part of the journey it handles best.
The theme closest to our own approach came from the sessions on RAIN RFID in smartphones. On the first day, Paul Muller of the RAIN Alliance led a workshop on why retail needs RAIN-enabled consumer devices. The Alliance is working with chipmakers and handset makers to bring RAIN RFID readers into everyday phones. It is also developing an open, hardware-agnostic Unified RAIN API so that developers can build an app once and run it on any RAIN-enabled phone.
Le Liu returned to the topic on the physical AI panel, where she described accessibility as the biggest change. Today RAIN RFID is mostly read by fixed readers and specialist handhelds. Putting a reader into an ordinary smartphone places that capability in the hands of every worker and eventually every consumer. She described the phone less as a reader and more as a common platform that connects people directly with physical objects.
This idea is at the heart of what we do. Bluetooth is already built into the phones and mobile computers people carry for work, which is why our approach to asset tracking is powered by the frontline. Those devices become the network that finds tagged assets as people go about their day, without installing infrastructure at every location.
We’re already working with multi-modal frontline devices that include RAIN RFID - the Zebra TC701, Zebra TC501 and Zebra EM45 all contain Bluetooth and scanners/cameras as you’d expect, but also have RAIN RFID built-in. All this points to reinforce our philosophy; the most powerful reader network is the one people already carry. It is encouraging to see the work going into user experience, privacy and standard APIs to make that a reality for RAIN RFID. When both technologies live on the same device, they can more easily cooperate within a single system rather than running as separate projects.
RAIN in Action 2026 reinforced why a Bluetooth company belongs in the RAIN Alliance.
The RAIN RFID community is recognising it is not the one technology that will do everything. Its own leaders and analysts are describing an ecosystem where each technology plays to its strengths and where value comes from turning data into business events that someone can act on, whatever technology captures it. The gaps between read points are real and end users are working hard to close them.
Everything we heard strengthens our belief that RAIN RFID and Bluetooth deliver the most value when they cooperate within the same solution, on the same devices and in the same workflows. We’ll have more to share on this soon.
Thank you to the RAIN Alliance for a well-organised event and to every speaker who shared their experience so openly. We look forward to continuing the conversation within the community. If you were in Madrid and want to talk about how RAIN RFID and Bluetooth can work together, we'd love to hear from you.
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