By R. Narayan
HID Global, a company providing an extensive range of end to end secure authentication solutions, has been consistently making inroads in the region, doubling up efforts in the region through partners in recent years.
There is a good reason to believe that HID Global security solutions is ideally poised to drive home the advantage of being well represented in the Middle East region that is showing a greater demand for security solutions. The company believes key sectors are deploying more and more the kind of security solutions that they are specializing in and to a great extent this is also being driven by the Technology savvy government initiatives.
One of the key areas for the company include secure smart card IDs and credentials in a variety of form factors for physical and logical access control; as well as converged solutions for building and computer access, transit payment, cashless vending, biometrics and other applications. HID is also a leader in secure printers and encoders with its Fargo range. These are card issuance solutions for organizations such as casinos, financial services firms, small businesses and retailers, as well as for temporary ID badge applications. HID’s variety of secure contactless and contact card readers are to be found in all kind of installations all over the Middle East. These include facility access control, mobile payment devices, computer network data security, medical record management, employee time and attendance, border control and more. The readers are compatible with HID cards, tokens, inlays and prelaminates. HID Global also provides a range of solutions in the government ID card space, from a single component to an entire system ranging from enablement and enrolment, through card issuance, authentication and management.
In its extensive portfolio, HID Global also offers a diverse line of RFID tags and transponders providing services in asset tracking to waste management in in LF, HF and UHF. In agriculture, HID Global contactless RFID transponders help manage and track livestock, pets, lab animals and products in the food supply chain. In addition, HID’s ActivID Credential Management System (CMS) enables the issuance, reissuance and revocation of Smart Chip-enabled credentials. With the ActivID CMS, organizations can deploy the Identity Assurance solution they require to secure access to their facilities, networks, systems and cloud-based applications.
One of the key growth areas for the company is smart cards. A smart card is usually a plastic card which contains a memory or microprocessor chip embedded in it, which is capable of storing and transmitting data. Smart cards have a wide area of application such as in transportation, telecommunication, for making government IDs, in the financial sector and in paid TV services.
The enhanced security feature that a smart card offers is a driving force in the development of the market with regards to the different sectors and this is expected to grow with time. According to BCC Research, the global smart card market is expected to clock $7.3 billion in 2017, growing at a CAGR of 7.4%.
Nat Pisupati, Regional Sales Director, for HID Global EMEA says, “We provide both contactless and contact smart cards. The Middle East, especially GCC countries are seeing great demand for smart cards. This is across sectors including Education, Government ID programs, hospitals and offices etc. in fact, all the government issued ID cards in the region are smart cards. There is a great momentum towards smart cards in the region.”
The company is seeing greater interest from Education sector in the region because of the higher utility that such smart cards could facilitate in addition to better authentication and security.
Pisupati says, “We signed an order with a Saudi university for a student ID card program for instance. They wanted a smart card because they wanted to incorporate a lot of applications and use not just for authentication purpose. They could for instance look at enabling it for students to use it for transactional purposes like buying Books or in the campus cafeteria for instance.”
He opines, “The concern has been on security and once that is taken care of, it will be a matter of time before more and more applications and services can be enabled on a smart card. Application like a driving card or residency renewal could among such services enabled on a smart card.”
The increase in the areas of application plays an important role in globally developing the smart card market. New technologies like NFC (Near Field Communication) and machine to machine communication are being used extensively in developing countries and are expected to support the growth of the smart card market in the future. Pisupati concurs that Near Field Communication (NFC) will continue to grow and NFC enabled payments through smartphones will become even more mainstream with time.
“We are at the forefront of NFC (Near Field Communication) Technology. Our main focus in Access Control. We are using NFC to open doors. There are other companies that are using smartphones featuring NFC for Banking transactions. As Mobile banking will also continue to grow, this means that financial transactions over mobile devices will need to be secured as well. At HID, we continue to invest in solutions for even stronger security solutions for mobile financial transactions,” adds Pisupati.
The manufacturer provides integrated solutions through partners, incorporating hardware and software which include secure printers, physical access control, strong authentication and identity assurance. In addition, it also provides software development tools and APIs to its partners to integrate their own solutions with their other products as well as third party solutions.
Pisupati says, “We only sell through the channel. We are well represented in the region by our partners and in each segment. Since we have different products lines from Logical Access, Physical Access, Easy Lobby, Visitor Management, Fargo printers, each product line has several partners in each country of the region. We are now training our partners on all products so that they are enabled to sell any or all of our product lines. So if a customer wants a particular solution, they would be better placed to do that.”
He further adds, “For the partners, we provide the card and reader but they then provide the rest of the solution they would be providing. We are one part of the solution but they could design a solution with components from other vendors as well. We also have a lot of big companies which use our HID Technology which we provide on an OEM basis.”
HID’s Physical Access Control Solutions provide an extensive line of access control readers and credentials in the industry. Comprising brands iCLASS Seos, iCLASS SE, iCLASS SmartID, HID Prox and Indala Prox, HID’s access control readers and credentials feature low-frequency (125 kHz), high-frequency (13.56 MHz) and multi-technology solutions. Among its popular products in the region are the i-CLASS SE cards that include SIO-enabled credentials featuring multi-layered security for maximum security and data protection. The EasyLobby Secure Visitor Management solutions that allow organizations to automate the entire process of registering a visitor, printing a badge and capturing detailed information in seconds by simply electronically scanning an ID (such as a driver’s license, business card or passport) are witnessing increased in demand.
Pisupati says, “The Physical Access control and Fargo product lines are the fastest growing in the region and the i-CLASS SE contactless cards with multi-layered security are our ‘bread and butter’ products. Our Easy Lobby Management which is a quite popular Visitor Management System is used by a lot of well-known companies in the region including Emirates, Ethihad, the Burj Khalifa etc. It not only helps populate the visitor data from his ID but also determines if there is any Police alert against the name. In fact the Police seems keen in getting this deployed in several of the major Buildings in the city.”
The company is increasing the speed of its expansion in the region and its wider neighborhood. This includes opening new offices and bringing in new hires.
“We have been building our presence in the region considerably. We are hiring a lot of people in the region, in Dubai and including countries like Saudi and African countries including Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa etc. It is a focused territory for us and we are going to be opening more offices.”
The company still sees a larger percentage of Business volumes from the enterprise but is beginning to see greater interest from the SMB segment as well
“We are seeing great interests from schools, Universities, hospitals, corporate offices etc in the region. For schools, such solutions are quite useful and they would be typically looking at ID, Access control, visitor management etc. The growth should also be better going forward because of more awareness of security issues.”
The future augurs well for HID Global as it keeps pace with growing demand for such solutions and works closely with its partners to increase its reach across markets.