FB

Could you provide our reader with a brief background of the company?

GS

Digital Persona started in 1996. We are the market leader in enterprise fingerprint biometric solutions. Unlike other companies in this domain we offer biometric recognition engines, optical sensors, firmware, drivers and applications, so we are pretty much soup to nuts in all that you require from an enterprise standpoint to deploy a fingerprint biometric solution in your organization. We have over 25 million users on a worldwide basis. At Digital Persona we have a good percentage of our revenue coming in from outside the US. That is because the concept of the fingerprint is understood and utilised without any fear of “Big Brother” watching, as many of these countries require a fingerprint on file to vote.

FB

Where you are seeing the greatest growth outside of North America?

GS

Latin America, in particular... we have seen successful implementations in Argentina, Chile and Mexico. We are recently starting to see successes in Europe - Spain in particular, where banking institutions are using fingerprint biometric for both convenience and security to authenticate the users that are coming to these institutions. These are the people who typically wouldn't have a proper record of themselves to present to the bank whereby after they register with the fingerprint no one can deny that this is the person who came by the branch to withdraw money or to do any other financial transaction.

FB

I know that the financial market is becoming a very large vertical segment in the biometric industry. What other vertical markets are you interested in?

GS

The retail industry is of strong interest whereby our products are utilized in the retail industry both at the storefront and in the back office. There are three uses for it basically. One is to prevent “buddy punching” so when you come in and you check in as an employee into the store we know who checked in and at what time and you cannot - because your friend or buddy was late or stuck in traffic or going to an appointment in the morning -- punch the timecard on his or her behalf. In this case you only log in for yourself. It also reduces shrinkage at the cash register level because now the supervisors don't have to worry about employees obtaining or sharing the key or passcode to authorize a return or an exchange. The supervisor has to show up at the station and put his fingerprint on the device itself that is attached to the cash register to authenticate and authorize that transaction.

FB

That provides a lot more control!

GS

Absolutely, a lot more control because it is being tracked, it is being audited and the back office and administrators are becoming aware. And the third benefit that I learned about recently is to reduce “lollygagging”. Lollygagging happens when somebody comes in the back door, punches his card or the register and it takes him ten minutes to walk to his work station while saying “hi” to friends, talking about how the weekend plans or the sports game that they watched. This wasted time is costing the retail industry money. So now what we are witnessing are retail institutions requiring their staff to punch in at the cash register itself so they are not paying for those ten to fifteen minutes it takes between walking from the back door to the station.

FB

You have referred to the health care, financial and retail areas. Are there any other verticals that you are focusing on?

GS

Yes we have some good activities in state and local governments with some accounts where security is a key issue especially nowadays with the loss of data that you hear about with some government agencies. Digital Persona now has an open architecture structure and that has been stressed with the latest software announcement that was made in supporting major notebooks embedded with fingerprint sensors. So we not only support our own sensors but our Pro software supports other embedded swipe sensors built into the notebooks of today's major brands. We are the only company today that provides the cross platform compatibility for all these desktops and notebooks. Imagine that you are a large organization with a variety of desktops and a combination of notebooks that could be from IBM, HP, Dell... etc. While these notebooks come with their own software, the software does not talk to each other or to the server component. Here we come providing the DigitalPersona Pro software that works with the desktop environment that has the Digital Persona sensors connected to them as well the variety of notebooks that you have across your enterprise at the workstation level and more importantly at the server level, thus allowing users to “roam”. That is that they can register at one station and can walk up to another station and they can log in using their fingerprint on that other machine and the IT department would know exactly when they logged in and what application they logged into.

FB

Thank you, George, for raising that issue. I can see that as a competitive advantage for Digital Persona.

GS

It is something that we have seen and something that we will continue to enhance upon -- again utilizing the accuracy of our biometric engine and the simplicity of our applications.

FB

What would say are other competitive advantages of Digital Persona solutions and products?

GS

We have improved network security at both the workstation level and the server level. Unlike other software that is available out there, our strength is in the combination of what we offer between the workstation and the connection with the server. When I mention the server -- I mean the server software that we sell to authenticate the users and keep track records of how people are logging in, which applications they are logging into and how long they are staying on. So that enhances other controls and helps with meeting some of the current government regulations such as HIPAA in the health care area for protection and controlled access to patient data. What I am talking about here is done both at the workstation level and the server level. We have also reduced IT costs -- that is IT support costs for our customers -- not only by not needing to change passwords manually but also not needing to go to someone's desk to figure out why they can't log into their station any more because that fingerprint or that authentication credential can be reset or duplicated at the IT administrator level. I mentioned “roaming”, which means you can log in at any station -- you don't need to work just on your particular workstation. We offer centralized management of the user's policy - that is provisioning and de-provisioning - done in combination with the workstation and server level. If an employee happens to leave a company, the IT manager can automatically shut down network access of the employee with one single action at the server level by simply removing the credential off the server. You don't need to worry any more about the employee turning on their notebooks because, even if they log in, they won't be able to access the network. Again we offer cross-platform compatibility with different desktops deployed along different notebooks and last but not least, in an environment like health care where we are using the DigitalPersona Pro Kiosk software product, we can allow “fast user” switching so that nurses and doctors don't have to wait for a long time to log into that station and can do the required screen switch by placing their registered finger on the sensor. Their desktop would come up on the screen and they can work on that station and afterwards log off instantly by picking an icon on the task bar and letting somebody else log into that station. That is called “fast user switching” between different users.

FB

Several reports out in the last several weeks from some of the key research companies - Frost & Sullivan, etc., are indicating that the biometric marketplace is poised for explosive growth over the next five years. What would you say has changed in the marketplace to now have Biometrics truly start to see significant growth?

GS

I agree with these statements and there are several factors. One is the user acceptance of fingerprints, and when we talk about biometrics in general we have to be careful because the term biometrics could mean a lot of biometric criteria such as face recognition, hand geometry, and iris, and we only deal with fingerprint. As you know, fingerprint today represents about 45-50% of today's overall biometric market. So let me comment on that. Today there is far less apprehension about people using their fingerprints and when we say we actually don't store images of the fingerprint -- what we store are data points technically called “minutia points” of your fingerprint after it has been scanned. This collection is compressed and saved at the workstation and the server as well. It cannot be reversed and no one can re-construct the fingerprint image.

Another key factor is the emergence of fingerprint sensors as a standard feature in enterprise and consumer notebooks. We believe most of the notebook computers in the very near future will have built-in fingerprint sensors. Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Toshiba as an example, have all made announcements and started shipping notebooks with that feature already. As a matter of fact if you walk to-day into some of the retail stores that are selling computers you will see some of these fingerprint-enabled notebooks on the shelf.

FB

What would you say is the greatest challenge facing the industry that might inhibit that growth?

GS

We have one today that I can comment on. In our partnership with Microsoft, we licensed them both the hardware and the software technology to provide products in the consumer channels. Microsoft has not communicated to the consumer that these devices can be used for security purposes, which is to replace the use of your password. If the industry doesn't stand behind blessing this technology as reliable and better than what is available today, it will inhibit the growth of the market. Now we know that in the next generation of Microsoft operating system (codename Vista), there will be more emphasis on the utilization of biometrics and fingerprints to authenticate a variety of utilities and applications.

FB

Thank you for taking the time to speak with findBIOMETRICS.

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