Feature Company

Interview with Giorgio Alboni, CTO, Biometrika

May 2007

fB

Can you please provide our readers with a brief background of the company?

GA

Biometrika is a young and dynamic company founded in 1999. Biometrika's core business is hardware and software for professional fingerprint recognition applications. Biometrika, unlike most of the Italian companies which are active in the biometric field, is not an integrator of components developed by third parties; in fact, all Biometrika's hardware and software products are completely designed and developed in house. The company mission is to provide to system integrators high quality devices at very affordable prices.

fB

Can you tell us about your product line-up?

GA

Biometrika products cover all the applications of fingerprint recognition. In fact even if the company is worldwide known for its Fx2000 desktop scanner, new products have been recently introduced: for example the HiScan desktop fingerprint was specifically conceived for government and AFIS applications (border crossing, e-passoports, ID-cards) where a 1" x 1" acquisition area and a very accurate optical quality is required. Biometrika also designed a professional terminal FxLock for Access Control and Time&Attendence applications.

fB

Overall, how would you rate your company's performance in 2006 and what influenced that performance?

GA

The company has been growing steadily since 2001 (the first year it was directly visible in the market). Initially, corporate logical and physical security was the main company business. Starting in 2005, government applications became more predominant. In 2006 the company was selected to provide thousands of its scanners for two important government applications in the Asiatic area.

fB

What new trends are you seeing in the biometrics industry and how are those trends affecting your business?

GA

We believe that large scale projects such as border crossing, e-documents, etc. will lead to an expansion of the high-segment of the market. In some countries (especially in Europe) privacy is a serious barrier against the large diffusion of biometrics, but imagine that every citizen had an ID-card with his fingerprint on-board: this would avoid the problem of enrolment and management of biometric data and could open to a large spectrum of new applications.

fB

You are a very global company. Where geographically are you seeing the greatest growth?

GA

Asia is a very important region for Biometrika: we have important partners and customers there. But the company presence is also growing in Europe and USA. For the USA market we are currently working to certify our HiScan model as PIV compliant.

fB

What would you say are the challenges still facing our industry?

GA

One of the main problems in this market is that people (also those with a good technical background in ICT) do not understand the difference between a small inexpensive fingerprint scanner for personal security and a professional device. The performance is totally different and could really lead to the success or failure of an entire project. But most of the people select devices just according to the available budget. For example in the consumer market typical customers understand that a 10Mpixel professional digital camera is completely different from a 2Mpixel entry-level model, but in biometrics it is not the same. Fortunately, our scanner models are professional devices but their cost is closer to low-end models.

fB

In terms of new product development, what can we expect to see from Biometrika in the future?

GA

Until now we have developed only single-finger scanners, but we are evaluating and will design and produce FBI-compliant fingerprint scanners (where 4 fingers are acquired together) specifically targeted to government application and AFIS. The experience we accumulated in the design of optics, mechanics, electronics and software allows us to have a very short time-to-market for new products.

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