In addition, Oblix has signed a worldwide reseller agreement with the Siemens Information and Communications Networks (ICN) group. Under the terms of the agreement, Siemens ICN will incorporate Oblix access management technology and web-services security products into its HiPath portfolio. 

This expanded relationship with Oblix is a part of the company’s larger strategy to grow its security and HiPath SIcurity DirX business. In addition to providing Siemens with worldwide resale rights, Oblix and Siemens will collaborate on product integration and development. The Oblix products, which enable enterprises to create, enforce, and monitor identity and access policies across Web applications and services, will be marketed as part of Siemens’ HiPath SIcurity DirX portfolio of identity & access management solutions. Siemens made an initial investment in Oblix during the company’s early stages and now, as a result of increased product synergy and a growing market opportunity, is making another strategic investment in the company to support Oblix’s current products and future roadmap for identity-based security solutions. 

“Siemens and Oblix are strengthening their partnership to benefit both companies as well as all enterprise customers,” said Mike Neuenschwander, senior analyst, Directory and Security Strategies Practice, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Burton Group. “Siemens is bringing its expertise and reach in directories, metadirectories, and provisioning together with Oblix’s industry-leading technology for delegated administration and access control to create an identity management product solution suite that will meet enterprise needs at all levels. Oblix benefits from Siemens’ financial strength and global distribution channels, while Siemens adds breadth to its identity management offerings.”

“With enterprise systems and users proliferating and regulatory requirements tightening, Siemens sees identity management as a strategic area of focus,” said Jackie Hoffmann, Investment Partner and Head of the ICN and ICN Mustang Funds for Siemens Venture Capital. “After evaluating the market, Siemens identified Oblix as the right organization for our security portfolio. They have technical vision and market leadership in the critical and fast-growing identity-based access management market and can provide Siemens customers with the security solutions they need to adapt increasingly complex environments.”

A biodegradeable smart card could be useful as an access control visitor credential if costs could be reduced significantly. The smart card is made from polyactic acid mixed with special additives. But despite its construction chips embedded between sheets of the plastic can still transmit signals.

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The smart cards are also as strong as their oil-based plastic counterparts. Sony and Mitsubishi Plastics worked together to develop the material for the smart card. It’s unclear when the product may hit the market, due to the cost to make the biodegradable plastic.

It’s a contract worth between $US6-$10 million. The CAC program, which has more than four million users across the DoD, is the largest and most advanced use of smart cards currently deployed by the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />U.S. government.

The selection follows testing by 3 nationally recognized commercial laboratories, EDS, L3 and Exponent, under the direction of Telos Corporation. Viisage will provide a solution to the DMDC, which is expected to include 1,700 Toppan CP400 printers as the fixed site desktop printers, consumables and services, for the production of secure identification cards throughout the Real-time Automated Personnel Identification System (RAPIDS). This solution employs secure and counterfeit-resistant card printing system, including pigment ink technology, which resists fading of images and barcodes, even under the most severe conditions.

HandReaders automatically take a three-dimensional reading of the size and shape of a hand and verify the user’s identity in less than one second. Hand geometry is the most commonly used technology for access control and time and attendance, according to Frost and Sullivan’s “World Biometrics Report.” 

“After Covenant Aviation Security was awarded the TSA’s private passenger screening contract at San Francisco International Airport in October of 2002, it was crucial to have a system in place that accurately and consistently identified our more than 1,200 employees arriving and departing work every day,” explains Tom Long, Executive Vice President of Covenant. “Since day one, our IR Recognition Systems’ biometric HandPunch 4000 has provided us with a quality product that we will continue to depend on at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />San FranciscoInternationalAirport.” 

HandReaders handle any population volume while providing reliability. With dramatically lower false reject and failure to enroll rates than other biometric technologies, the value of HandReaders grows as the number of users and/or transactions increases. With so many people working at San FranciscoAirport, HandReaders were essential. 

Employees perform all the functions provided by regular TSA employees at other airports, including screening passengers, running X-ray machines, checking baggage, and manning security checkpoints. Before beginning their shifts, employees must pass through an area where their identities are checked with HandReaders. 

“Ensuring that employees are who they say they are is critical to securing the airport,” explains James Wendt, co-owner of Time & Technology, which specializes in biometric time and attendance and security solutions. “We pushed strongly for the use of hand geometry at the airport because we’ve been using it since the late ’80s.”s

Rutenbar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, working jointly with researchers at the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />University of California at Berkeley received a $US1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to move automatic speech recognition from software into hardware. The problem is power—or rather, the lack of it. It takes a very powerful desktop computer to recognize arbitrary speech. “But we can’t put a Pentium in my cell phone, or in a soldier’s helmet, or under a rock in a desert,” explains Rutenbar, “the batteries wouldn’t last 10 minutes.” The goal is to create a radically new and efficient silicon chip architecture that only does speech recognition, but does this 100 to 1,000 times more efficiently than a conventional computer. Importantly Carnegie Mellon researchers pioneered much of today’s successful speech recognition technology. This includes the influential ‘Sphinx’ project, the basis for many of today’s commercial speech recognizers. 

“Security applications are the big reason we were chosen for this award,” says Rutenbar. “Imagine if an emergency responder could query a critical online database with voice alone, without returning to a vehicle, in a noisy and dangerous environment. The possibilities are endless.” Researchers plan to unveil speech-recognition chip architecture in two to three years.