(Imagen 4)
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
I previously promised that I’d discuss why Integrated Biometrics felt the need to introduce IB360 for its partners.
Integrated Biometrics has identified four evolutionary changes in the identity market that prompt the need for such a solution.
I’m going to limit my thoughts to two of the four changes that Integrated Biometrics mentioned.
Decentralized systems
When I started in the biometrics industry in 1994, an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS) was usually a centralized system. Tenprint and latent examiners at the state capital (there was no federal IAFIS back then) would work in buildings at or near a huge minicomputer that held the state’s fingerprint records. Perhaps there may have been a few remote tenprint and latent workstations connected by modem, and perhaps there were some livescan stations scattered around, but for the most part these client/server systems had a single server in a state computer room. (Well, except for the Western Identification Network, but WIN was ahead of its time.)
Fast forward 30 years, and while this model may work in the United States, it may not work elsewhere.
What if you don’t have internet or cellular communications? (Yes, cellular. Modern edge devices are a topic addressed in the Integrated Biometrics article that I won’t go into here.)
Or what if the communications are so incredibly slow that it would take forever to submit a search to the capital city, and return results to the originator?
This is where decentralized systems come into play. Rather than requiring everyone to ping the same central hub, the biometric database is distributed and synchronized among multiple servers in multiple locations.
Or maybe you’re getting ahead of me here and realizing that “servers” is too limiting. What if you could put all or part of a biometric database on your smartphone, so you can search a captured biometric against a database immediately without waiting for network communication time?
Such decentralized systems were impossible in 1994, but they are certainly possible today. And IB360 lets partners build their own biometric systems with decentralization and synchronization.
Speaking of building…
Demand for speed
As I mentioned, I’ve been in the biometric industry since 1994, and although my early years were spent in a pre-contract proposals role, I’ve seen enough post-contract deployments to know that they take a long time. Whether you were dealing with Printrak, NEC, Sagem Morpho, or the upstart Cogent, it would take many months if not years to deploy a fingerprint system.
- For the most part, this is still true today with “pre-made” systems from NEC, IDEMIA, Thales, and the others.
- And it’s also true if you decide to deploy your own “custom-built” fingerprint or biometric system from scratch.
Either way, there is a lot of engineering, integration, and orchestration that must take place before a system is deployed. You can’t take an AFIS for Bullhead City, Arizona and deploy it in Anaheim, California…or the state of Tennessee…or the nation of Switzerland. You need to perform months of tailoring/configuration first.
Integrated Biometrics asserts that waiting years for a biometric system is far too long.
Other changes
I’ll let you read the Integrated Biometrics article to learn about the other two evolutionary changes: more powerful hardware (I’ve alluded to this), and a myriad of use cases.
All of these changes have impacted the biometric market, and prompted Integrated Biometrics to introduce IB360. To read about this modular software suite and its benefits, visit the IB360 product page.
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