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Blogs - March 18, 2021

Building an ecosystem for success

Pragmatic is not just the name of our company, it is how we approach every task as individuals and as teams. Alastair Hanlon, CCO, explores how this pragmatism has led us to form a number of deep partnerships with a diverse range of institutions and customers as we build our ecosystem for ConnectIC products.

What is an ecosystem?

The term ecosystem is used now much more frequently than a decade ago, and there is an obvious reason why: some of the most valuable companies in the world – Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Tencent were successful because they deliberately built formidable interconnected networks of customers, partners and suppliers. Closer to home, we also have the example of Arm, whose immense network of silicon partners, manufacturers, software providers, systems integrators, to name just a few, is a perfect illustration of how powerful the ecosystem approach can be.

A solution ecosystem, like Arm’s, brings together complementary suppliers to offer a broad range of options to customers, helping to get them to market faster and with a better product. Here at Pragmatic, we realised very early on that the potential of our unique technology platform would be magnified with a network of partners helping us to achieve our vision of a trillion FlexICs.

Who are the partners for ConnectIC products?

Our ConnectIC RFID product family ecosystem includes a range of partners that bring global reach and different capabilities. Along with Avery Dennison Smartrac, the largest provider of RFID inlays globally, we work with a number of other companies including Warsaw based Talkin’Things, BSN in China and S&S in Taiwan, all of whom bring a unique approach to the RFID industry. And in order to ensure that these and future inlay partners can be successful, we worked closely with Mühlbauer, the leading supplier of smart label production equipment, as well as other machinery providers, so that existing production lines are easy to upgrade to be able to pick and place our FlexICs.

ATMAFor our mutual end customers, the solution they need is more than just the RFID inlay.  A part of the puzzle that is growing in importance is the software platform behind the scenes. To realise their ambitions of a secure and traceable supply chain that can deliver a truly awesome omnichannel experience for consumers requires a platform that can associate the unique IDs of their smart connected products in a way that creates meaningful data and presents it to all the actors in the chain including the end consumer.

This week, Avery Dennison Smartrac has launched atma.io, a cloud-based platform that can be used to authenticate, track and trace, and engage customers. See here.

And this combination of low-cost inlays with software platforms is not restricted to consumer facing brands. In 2019 we started working with Topolytics, whose Waste Map platform is set to become the go-to waste reporting dashboard, on a project with the Tyre Recovery Association. Read more about that here.

A Pragmatic approach

Rome wasn’t built in a day, goes the saying, and developing the Pragmatic ecosystem is an on-going process. As our unique technology platform opens up a wide range of applications beyond those for our ConnectIC RFID family, it is creating multiple new markets that would never have been considered with conventional electronics. And as we know that the key to delivering successful projects is to combine the unique strengths of the right partners for each task, we are keeping the diverse needs of our customers in mind as we collaborate with new companies. We look forward to sharing more news in this area soon. We are looking forward to an exciting future and a trillion FlexICs.

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