The history of L-1 Identity Solutions has always fascinated me. I dealt with then-bitter enemies Digital Biometrics and Identix while I was at Printrak, with Viisage while I was at Motorola, and de facto competed with MorphoTrust while I was at MorphoTrak…until MorphoTrust in effect acquired MorphoTrak when IDEMIA NSS was set up and I reported to a supervisor in Massachusetts.
I used to have a PowerPoint presentation that traced the family tree of all of L-1’s acquisitions. Wish I still had it. But here’s a little taste of where things stood before Joseph Atick and Robert LaPenta started combining things:
Identix, while making some efforts in the AFIS market, concentrated on creating live scan fingerprinting machines, where it competed (sometimes in court) against companies such as Digital Biometrics and Bioscrypt.
The fingerprint companies started to compete against facial recognition companies, including Viisage and Visionics.
Oh, and there were also iris companies such as Iridian.
And there were other ways to identify people. Even before 9/11 mandated REAL ID (which we may get any year now), Polaroid was making great efforts to improve driver’s licenses to serve as a reliable form of identification.
(Some former links are dead and were removed from the bullets above. But the Digital Biometrics-Identix court case is described here, and Polaroid’s history with driver’s licenses in Utah is described here.)
Back in 2023 I assembled a list of “Five Topics a Biometric Content Marketing Expert Needs to Understand.” My fifth topic was “How L-1 Identity Solutions came to be.” I claimed I was half joking, but in reality I was completely serious. Despite similar efforts by HID and others (including IDEMIA), the sheer number of companies that combined to form L-1 remains unmatched.
Why do I have a sudden interest in things that happened at Morpho nearly 10 years ago, and at Printrak over 20 years ago? I’ll explain at the end of this post.
Printrak acquires…
Let’s start by looking at my former employer Printrak. In the summer of 1996 Printrak became a publicly traded company, and had secured the four-letter ticker “AFIS” back when an automated fingerprint identification system was THE biometric solution. (Face schmace. Iris schmiris. Voice schmoice.)
But then Printrak began to get bigger.
In April 1997 Printrak acquired a Greenville, South Carolina company, TFP Inc., that manufactured mugshot systems.
Later that same year Printrak acquired SunRise Imaging of Fremont, California, a provider of microfiche scanning services.
Printrak finished the year by acquiring the computer aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS) unit of SCC Communications Corp., thus launching activities in Boulder, Colorado.
These acquisitions, costing millions of dollars each, increased the capabilities of Printrak. Several years later, I would be part of creating a “digital justice solution” that married AFIS, CAD, RMS, mugshot, and other services.
But not yet. Before that could happen, Printrak changed dramatically.
Printrak is acquired!
There used to be an online document that listed the entire negotiation history of what happened after these acquisitions, but I can no longer access that document. Instead, I found a document that lists the final results:
“ITEM 5. OTHER EVENTS On August 28, 2000, Printrak International Inc. (the “Registrant”) issued a press release regarding an agreement (the “Merger Agreement”) among Motorola, Inc. (“Motorola”), the Registrant, Panther Acquisition Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola (“Acquisition Sub”) and the Giles Living Trust UDT dated December 17, 1993, The Giles Family Foundation, and The Smith Family Revocable Trust dated October 2, 1992 (collectively referred to herein as the “Registrant’s Majority Stockholders”) pursuant to which Acquisition Sub will be merged (the “Merger”) with and into Registrant, with Registrant surviving the Merger as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola. On August 28, 2000 the Registrant’s Majority Stockholders executed a written consent of stockholders approving the terms and authorizing the execution of the Merger Agreement by the Registrant. Under the Merger Agreement, Motorola has agreed to pay $12.1406 per share for all the outstanding common stock and common stock equivalents of Registrant for an aggregate merger consideration of approximately $160 million.”
In the language above, the two “Giles” entities were controlled by Richard Giles, who had joined De La Rue Printrak and then purchased the Printrak part from De La Rue. The Smith Family Revocable Trust was controlled by Charles Smith, another Printrak employee. While Printrak was a publicly traded entity, Richard Giles held over half the shares, and therefore had the power to sell, provided that the deal received the proper approvals from the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Romania, and other countries.
Why did Motorola want to acquire Printrak? Because Motorola needed a CAD product to pair with its significant business in police radios. And among Printrak’s acquisitions was a division with a CAD product, making that acquisition by far the most significant of the three acquisitions from 1997. Microfiche went nowhere, and the fact that the present company DataWorks Plus was founded in 2000 in Greenville, South Carolina is no accident.
But returning to Printrak, its growth through acquisitions made Printrak itself an acquisition target.
SCC, Sunrise Imaging, Printrak…and Motorola.
Morpho acquires…
Fast forward a few years, and a lot had happened at the Motorola company that Printrak joined. I won’t go into the history of Motorola during that decade, but by 2008 the company was shedding businesses that weren’t critically important. The CAD and RMS business was critically important, but the fingerprint business—the original pre-1997 Printrak—was not.
“In the late 1970s, a computer engineering subsidiary of France’s largest financial institution responded to a request by the French Ministry of Interior to work on automated fingerprint processing for the French National Police. Later, this company joined with the Morphologic Mathematics Laboratory at the Paris School of Mines to form a subsidiary called Morpho Systems that went on to develop a functioning [AFIS].”
Morpho Systems and its North American subsidiary were acquired by several companies in succession, the last being Safran.
And Safran thought that Motorola’s “Biometric Business Unit” would complement its existing biometric activities. So Safran purchased the unit (including me) from the willing seller Motorola, which became part of MorphoTrak.
“By 2011, Safran decided that it needed additional identity capabilities, so it acquired L-1 Identity Solutions and renamed the acquisition as MorphoTrust.”
These various acquisitions strengthened Safran’s identity and biometric capabilities, which was good because Safran’s competitors were also busy. Eventually the entire identity and security business was renamed “Morpho” after the little old French company from the 20th century. This was a major division within Safran’s empire…
Morpho is acquired!
…but Safran remained an aerospace/defense company, and Morpho was a distraction.
The point I want to make? Morpho’s growth through acquisitions made Morpho itself an acquisition target.
Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit, L-1 Identity Solutions, Morpho…and Advent International.
Incode acquires…
Now before someone slams me, I’m not making any predictions, just some observations.
Now let’s look at my former employer Incode. Unlike Printrak, Incode is not a publicly-traded firm. Like IDEMIA, Incode is held by private investors, although in Incode’s case there are multiple investors, not just one. Incode’s investors include General Atlantic, Softbank, J. P. Morgan, and others.
Lately Incode has been on an acquisition spree of its own.
Now remember that Incode’s investors didn’t invest just because they want to see cool technologies. They invested because they want to make money. And these moves potentially strenghthen Incode so that its investors may make a profit through an Incode IPO…
…or an acquisition of Incode by another entity, which would continue the consolidation of the identity/biometric industry.
Bredemarket provides several services, but one service I don’t provide is custom software development.
Even though I’ve launched mobile apps.
Well, not really.
During my final years at MorphoTrak, I handled speaker and session coordination for the company’s annual Users Conference. Among my duties were managing the loading of speaker and session biographies into the CVENT-powered conference website.
CVENT had a sister mobile app known as CrowdCompass that allowed presentation of the information in mobile form. I briefly mentioned the app before. You would load your information into the existing framework, and then CVENT would facilitate the approval of your custom app in the App Store and Google Play.
From a Google search.
I found an online reference to one of my old apps, but the app itself does not appear to be on the CNET website.
And you know that picture of me at a podium, waving my arm around? I was evangelizing my app to the Users Conference crowd.
Evangelizing my so-called custom software development.
While Bredemarket as an entity has only officially worked one trade show, my personal trade show, conference, and exhibition experience extends back years.
My years of session and speaker coordination
For example:
In a past life I was tasked with session and speaker coordination for an annual conference. Dozens of sessions, dozens of speakers, probably about a dozen rooms, a myriad of microphone and table and cable setups, a little under a week…plus a dozen planners and dozens of employees and third-party conference staff.
There were many ways in which things could go wrong:
What if a demonstrator wanted to show an application on their iPhone, but you only had one-stage cables for a Windows laptop?
What if a keynote speaker wanted to show an application video as part of their remarks, but the audio-visual staff hadn’t tested the video yet? (Back in the day I worked with Sardis Media. They are magicians.)
What if an executive had an inspired idea to move one of our main room speakers to Wednesday morning…right when the speaker was conducting a workshop? (Human cloning was not an option.)
Worst yet, what if a speaker fell ill before boarding their flight to the conference venue…and we now had a big gaping hole the next morning?
Some of these things didn’t happen, but they could have…and if they did, it meant disruption of my “three chairs and 2 mics on the main stage on Tuesday at 8:45” meticulously made plans.
I excelled at session and speaker coordination
Yes, plans. I had them.
This was one of the times in which I fell back to Excel as my go-to project management tool, capturing all the necessary data, making it filterable and sortable.
The years have faded my memories of the details I tracked, but I needed to know session titles, dates and times, rooms, speakers, panelists, presentations, videos, live demos, on-stage chairs and tables, handouts, and other things besides.
This speaker could use the podium mic. And he had the conference app.
And that was just for DURING the conference. BEFORE the conference I needed to ensure that session abstracts and speaker biographies were written and found their way to the printed conference program, the registration website, and the conference app.
This was also one of the times that I heavily relied on the color printer that was hidden away in the conference organizers’ area. And it had to be color, because some schedule items were green, some yellow…and some red.
The schedule was constantly revised. And as the week wore on and the days dwindled down to a precious few, I would hide the older rows on my schedule and literally lighten my workload.
I would grip the latest iteration of my private master schedule and race around the conference hotel—sometimes the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa, sometimes another—checking things off my checklist. (All names are fictional.)
Hey, John, could you get your presentation to the Sardis folks by noon today? And you decided not to show that video, right?
Paul, the handouts for your workshop should be in the Guasti Room…I’m sorry, your session is in the Etiwanda Room. The handouts will be in the Etiwanda Room a half hour before your workshop.
George, you will be mic’ed up before the session…right?
Ringo! Side room. Five minutes. We need a raffle winner before 10:30.
By mid afternoon Thursday the last large sessions were done, the last workshops were wrapping up, the last raffle prizes were given away, and all that was left was the final banquet. Plenty could go wrong there, also, but that’s not part of this story.
“Usually, the government agency or private organization acts as the “controller” or owner of the biometric data, while the biometric vendor is just the “processor” of the data.
“But there are exceptions. In late April, Joel R. McConvey described a proposal in which the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Police Department would provide Biometrica with 2.5 million facial images from its jail records.
“Why would any biometric vendor want to be the controller of biometric data? One plausible reason is for internal testing to improve the vendor’s algorithms by continuously testing them against live data. There may be other reasons, such as offering new services.”
But this is actually the SECOND time I have been featured by Biometric Update. If you check its YouTube channel, you can find the 2015 gem “MorphoTrak (Safran) – MorphoWay demo”: https://youtube.com/shorts/mqfHAc227As
Stay tuned for my next Biometric Update appearance in 2035.
The COVID-19 pandemic may be a fading memory, but contactless biometrics remains popular.
Back in the 1980s, you had to touch something to get the then-new “livescan” machines to capture your fingerprints. While you no longer had messy ink-stained fingers, you still had to put your fingers on a surface that a bunch of other people had touched. What if they had the flu? Or AIDS (the health scare of that decade)?
As we began to see facial recognition in the 1990s and early 2000s, one advantage of that biometric modality was that it was CONTACTLESS. Unlike fingerprints, you didn’t have to press your face against a surface.
“Actually this effort launched before that, as there were efforts in 2004 and following years to capture a complete set of fingerprints within 15 seconds…”
This WAS an unusual question, considering that it took a minute or more to capture inked prints or livescan prints. And the government expected this to happen in 15 seconds?
A decade later several companies were pursuing this in conjunction with NIST. There were two solutions: dedicated kiosks such as MorphoWave from my then-employer MorphoTrak, and solutions that used a standard smartphone camera such as SlapShot from Sciometrics and Integrated Biometrics.
The, um, upshot is that now contactless fingerprint and face capture are both a thing. Contactless capture provides speed, and even the impossible 15 second capture target was blown away.
Fingers and faces can be captured “on the move” in airports, border crossings, stadiums, and university lunchrooms and other educational facilities.
Perhaps Iris and voice can be considered contactless and fast.
While the words “consolidation” and “contraction” have a similar sound and are often linked, they are actually two separate conditions, as you can see in the identity/biometric industry.
Consolidation occurs when separate entities become one. Ping Identity and ForgeRock (Ping Identity). Sagem Morpho and Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit (MorphoTrak). Digital Biometrics and Identix and Viisage and Visionics and Iridian and ComnetiX and don’t forget the ID part of Digimarc and many others (L-1 Identity Solutions).
Contraction occurs when an existing entity becomes smaller. Hikvision’s reported layoff of 1,000 employees is a recent and relevant example.
“Ah, but Hikvision is a special case,” you may be saying. “They’re linked to human rights abuses and sanctioned by Western governments. Many identity/biometric players are not sanctioned.”
But I’m not hearing loud celebrations from these other firms.
I’ve privately heard three separate stories, one of which I just heard on Monday, involving major identity/biometric companies. All three stories involve firms that are not sanctioned. In all three cases the firms perform major business with Western governments. And all three stories involve contraction which would have been unthinkable a mere five years ago.
Not too long ago I compiled a list of four significant events that positively impacted the identity/biometric industry. That list included 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombings, Apple’s Touch ID, and COVID.
I’m starting to wonder whether that last event was, in the long term, a net positive or a net negative.
First example: A couple of years ago, when consulting for a large client, I worked on a proposal with one of the client’s partners, and one of the employees in the partner organization happened to be a former coworker from MorphoTrak.
Second example: This morning I’m meeting with Gene Volfe, a former coworker at Incode Technologies (we started at Incode on the same day). We’re working on a project together that requires Gene’s demand generation skills and my content skills…which we will be employing for the benefit of another former MorphoTrak coworker.
Third example: Speaking of Incode, two of my former coworkers are reuniting at a different company. As a sign that these two know each other well, one made a point of saying to the other, “Go Bills!”
And yes, Gene, I remember how you like Google Docs…
I have not been to an identity trade show in years, and sadly I won’t be in Washington DC next week for connect:ID…although I’ll be thinking about it.
I’ve only been to connect:ID once, in 2015. Back in those days I was a strategic marketer with MorphoTrak, and we were demonstrating the MorphoWay. No, not the Morpho Way; the MorphoWay.
As an aside, you’ll notice how big MorphoWay is…which renders it impractical for use in U.S. airports, since space is valuable and therefore security features need a minimum footprint. MorphoWay has a maximum footprint…just ask the tradespeople who were responsible for getting it on and off the trade show floor.
I still remember several other things from this conference. For example, in those days one of Safran’s biometric competitors was 3M. Of course both Safran and 3M have exited the biometric industry, but at the time they were competing against each other. Companies always make a point of checking out the other companies at these conferences, but when I went to 3M’s booth, the one person I knew best (Teresa Wu) was not at the booth. Later that year, Teresa would leave 3M and (re)join Safran, where she remains to this day.
Yes, there is a lot of movement of people between firms. Looking over the companies in the connect:ID 2021 Exhibitor Directory, I know people at a number of these firms. Obviously people from IDEMIA, of course (IDEMIA was the company that bought Safran’s identity business), but I also know people at other companies, all of whom who were former coworkers at IDEMIA or one of its predecessor companies:
Aware.
Clearview AI.
GET Group North America.
HID Global.
Integrated Biometrics.
iProov.
NEC.
Paravision.
Rank One Computing.
SAFR/RealNetworks.
Thales.
Probably some others that I missed.
And I know people at some of the other companies, organizations, and governmental entities that are at connect:ID this year.
Some of these entities didn’t even exist when I was at connect:ID six years ago, and some of these entities (such as Thales) have entered the identity market due to acquisitions (in Thales’ case, the acquisition of Gemalto, which had acquired 3M’s biometric business).
So while I’m not crossing the country next week, I’m obviously thinking of everything that will be going on there.
Incidentally, this is one of the last events of the trade show season, which is starting to wind down for the year. But it will ramp up again next spring (for you Northern Hemisphere folks).
