The good part about this news that HP and GS1 Canada are working together on a GS1-based product recall application is that HP, a major hardware… and software company, is hip to GS1. That’s more than you can say about someother makers of major business applications and systems. Maybe HP’s push here will influence some corporate applications providers to make their solutions more GS1 user friendly, especially in healthcare?

This HP announcement seems to be focused on food and not pharmaceuticals, for example, but still it is a step in the right direction:

HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced along with the Canadian arm of GS1 – a leading global nonprofit organization dedicated to improving supply chain efficiencies – a cloud-based recall service that traces and removes potentially harmful food products from the supply chain… The GS1 Canada Product Recall service will run on the HP cloud computing platform for manufacturing, which allows companies to see and share information across the supply chain. Food and consumer products organizations can use the service to reduce errors, decrease the amount of time it takes to respond to a recall, and mitigate the costs associated with managing the recall process.

The other thing, of course, is that GS1 isn’t defined by hardware choice or even cloud computing options. Therefore, the real value-added here coming from HP is the recall application and its use of the increasingly favored GS1 product identification standard.