Mobile working Toolkit

Solving RFID's image problems

Aaron Tan CNETAsia

Published: 02 Jun 2005 19:45 BST

Symbol Technologies chief executive William Nuti is good at pulling out the weeds in corporate restructuring.

And this he did when he moved up the ladder last year from his chief operating officer position to head the once-flagging barcode applications company that had been dogged by several accounting scandals.

A former top executive at networking giant Cisco, Nuti was successful in weeding out the bad performance issues and harvesting the good. In less than a year, the company's revenue rose to $1.3bn (£720m), up 13 percent from the year before. Operating costs were also slashed, by $15.5m.

Nuti also refreshed the company's entire product line, steering Symbol toward new areas, such as RFID, or radio frequency identification.

In a recent interview with ZDNet UK sister site CNETAsia, Nuti spoke about several areas, including intellectual-property rights, and privacy issues concerning RFID.

Q: You recently filed a second patent-infringement lawsuit against Intermec, relating to some of Symbol's patents. Can you give us an update? And how are your customers affected?
A: No customer will be affected whatsoever. A lot of attention has been paid to it — more than we anticipated. It's simply a matter of us protecting our intellectual property in the market that we have worked so hard for.

We have 875 patents that we've developed over the last 30 years and where we've spent an incredible amount of money. The two areas where we are launching suits against Intermec are wireless and 2D barcodes. We think we have an excellent case in those areas.

How do you view the fact that some businesses have abused intellectual property for their economic benefit against the greater good of society?
As the chief executive of a company that has invested so much in intellectual property, it's disturbing for me to see another business in the market act with the lack of integrity or ethics that I would expect the global business landscape to live up to.

Do you agree that software patents are accorded too easily?
I think that just like hardware, software patents are equally important in the market. The buzz around Microsoft spending a lot of money developing their software and their patent infrastructure has to be respected from a global perspective.