FB

Please tell us about the background of the company?

JT

Biometronix GmbH is a German based biometric company and was founded in May, 2003 by me and my business partner Mark Völkl. We started the company completely with our own money and received a small financing loan from the Bavarian State owned bank Lfa. Mark and I are the 100% stockholders at the moment. As a start up company, we are always open for strategic or financial investor discussions.

The reason we started the company was our disappointment about the existing biometric middleware and software we sold from 2000 to 2003 as a sales agency and reseller for different biometric vendors. 99.9% of the solutions were and are still based on Microsoft.

You must know in Europe there is a big community that are using other systems like UNIX, Linux, and Sun Solaris etc.

From our customer's wishes, we saw the growing demand for network-based systems, which can be operated and administrated through TCP/IP. So we decided to found Biometronix and focus our company on developing and designing a platform independent management application to operate and integrate manifold biometric access control devices, such as fingerprint scanners, across Internet Protocol (IP)-operated networks. Biometronix was born.

FB

How did your company become involved with biometrics?

JT

I was involved in biometrics first in 1999 when I was an employee at the first European Discount Broker Bank. At this time the bank was looking for a security system and I was researching the biometric market. I contacted various vendors and after this experience I decided to start a biometric business. In 2000 I started as a business consultant, reseller and integrator for biometric security solutions from different biometric firms, for the German market. But there was no market in Germany.

So, after 3 years of research and contact making we saw our chance to become a leading German biometric player and founded Biometronix GmbH. Our company is still establishing the German biometric market, which is really a small market at the moment. But with the decision to integrate biometrics into the new German passports, we think we have great opportunities in the future, and with our flagship product BioLANCC we think we have opportunities worldwide.

FB

Please describe your biometric product line-up.

JT

Our flagship product is BioLANCC (Biometric Local Area Network Control Centre). BioLANCC software development was and still is a jointly undertaken project between Biometronix and ITIS e.V., a flexible research administration organization of UniBwM (University of Federal Armed Forces Munich).

BioLANCC is a platform-independent management application designed to operate and integrate manifold biometric access control devices, across TCP/IP-operated networks. The overall system implements a Java-based 3-tier application, which integrates an SQL data base for essential device and user data. Besides its key characteristic of the platform independency, a flexible and time-driven access rights and device management has been developed, which is extended by an open scheme for the definition of groups of devices and users in the room access management. The graphical user interface maintains the user's view on his well-known and favorable operating system (including Windows OS, Linux, UNIX, Sun Solaris 9 and Mac OS).

I think we have at the moment, a worldwide unique software application that allows us to integrate biometric devices, into every existing operating systems environment like Mac OS, Linux, UNIX, Sun Solaris 9 and Windows environments

At the moment we offer BioLANCC-REMOTE and BioLANCC-MONITOR.  

BioLANCC-REMOTE is a tool that gives you the ability to manage your users and hardware of the centralized BioLANCC database from every point on earth over the Internet. This is very helpfully for administrators, who are not locally based in the corporate headquarters and want to administer BioLANCC from a remote point.

With BioLANCC-MONITOR you've got only READ-rights in BioLANCC from a remote computer. So you can easily check over the Internet the reporting, the status of BioLANCC, see user lists, groups and the biometric hardware.

At the moment we are integrating a 3D Face scan system in BioLANCC and we have already integrated Fingerprint systems. In 2005 we want to integrate an Iris recognition system and test our first Wireless LAN based BioLANCC.

Also we plan to release our BioLANCC Web Access product in the middle of 2006.

For the future, we are looking for interested hardware partners who are interested in integrating their hardware solutions with our BioLANCC software. We are also seeking sales partners to help us promote and sell BioLANCC worldwide.

FB

What are some of the advantages of your solutions?

JT

The biggest advantage of BioLANCC is that it is platform and database independent. It is programmed in JAVA, so BioLANCC is run-able on Microsoft, SunSolaris, MACOS, Linux, and UNIX. Anyone who decided today to run a biometric security solution can do this with our software, it does not matter which operating system the user runs.

The object-oriented implementation is based on SUN's JAVA 1.4.2 (or the newest 1.5.x) Virtual Machine and the MySQL 4.0 data base server. JAVA Swing classes provide a user-friendly graphical interface, which adapts automatically to the look and feel of the used platform. The JDBC interface allows for the usage of any SQL-Database.

The next advantage is the TCP/IP interface which allows our customers to integrate their complete organization worldwide. This is very interesting, for example, for governments that want to administer different locations in different areas with biometric solutions from one centralized location.

Another Example: The owner of a company with its headquarters in the USA and different branch offices and plants worldwide--maybe Germany, Singapore and Cape Town, can do the complete administration of a biometric access control systems with BioLANCC for every location worldwide from his notebook. He can grant access to you to any plant at any time via Internet. This is granted throughout a pure IP-based communication between centralized user data server and remote biometrics devices.

The next advantage is the Java-based 3-tier access right management application, which gives you the highest standard/ grade of security.

Further we can integrate every existing biometric hardware system that is on the market through the open device architecture. BioLANCC supports a highly flexible interface for new hardware, so it is easy to integrate new biometric hardware.

FB

You focus on physical access and logical access and work with many different types of biometrics from Face, Fingerprint to Iris. In which area are you seeing the greatest growth?

JT

I would say we focus on biometric software and middleware for physical and logical access.

I think the fingerprint area together with the middleware and software will see the greatest growth in the Logical IT access area.

The costs for Iris and Face products can be a limiting factor as compared to Fingerprint. I think the key factor regarding growth is the pricing. The end-user needs and wants to have an inexpensive secure working solution. IBM did a great job here in Germany, I think, with their biometric advertising campaign for their biometric notebooks, for example.

A big growing market for us is in mass-market, an end-user market and that is the aim of all the vendors-- to create a mass market for biometrics and become a part of it.

For the physical access area growth will depend on the hardware systems. I think there will be a multi biometric solution in the future with Face, Iris and Finger.

In my vision in 5 to 10 years, every computer has a biometric system and every Internet user has a biometric identity in case of Identity theft and fraud etc.  

FB

Can you describe some of your deployments and success?

JT

Our biggest deployment is a fingerprint based access control system operated by BioLANCC at the German Federal Armed Forces University. I can say that we have designed the biggest biometric access control environment within the German Federal Armed Forces. This is a very positive thing to be able to say, especially as a start up company. This environment secures laboratories, classrooms, offices and server rooms at the University. At the moment we have nearly 1600 users. They are soldiers, professors, students and other employees of the University. Since the integration of our BioLANCC software one and a half years ago we have had no single shut down of the complete system. The biggest success for the University is the cost factor. The students come for trimesters and before the biometric system was implemented every student received a physical key, which 5 % of students lost. The savings in the first year without keys were over 10,000 Euros.

Further, we have biometric installations with our BioLANCC software in different gyms and health clubs. We see this as a good target market for biometrics.

FB

Where, geographically, are you trying to grow your company?

JT

As the producer of the BioLANCC software we are trying to grow our company worldwide.

At the moment, we see that there is a lot of interest in BioLANCC from all parts of the world, so we will grow internationally.

At the moment, we are starting to promote BioLANCC in the USA where we have our first installation in Miami at the end of October. In November, we start with installations in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines. Also we have interested parties in the Arabian areas.

As a biometric expert, biometric integrator and biometric developer, we want to become one of the leading European firms in the next 5 years.  

FB

What are some of the challenges for the biometric industry now?

JT

First I have to say that in my opinion the complete biometric industry is in a start up phase. When you see the market volume of the biometric market for Germany, it is unbelievable! There is at the moment no market. For us here in Germany the challenge is to create a biometric market.

The biggest challenge for the biometric industry worldwide is to create trust in biometrics and the biometric systems and products for the future. In other words, create and develop safe and secure products that work well. In the past, there were companies selling products, which were not working quite as promised. I do not think this is the case today.

We must also create a growing, worldwide, network and community of experts, because the future of the biometrics is very complex and is not just developing algorithms.

FB

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

JT

You are most welcome Peter.