Feature Company

Interview with Kass Aiken, Chief Operating Officer, Ceelox Inc.
February 2007

FB
Kass, can you please provide our readers with a brief background of your company?

KA
Ceelox is going into its 4th year. We started out as an encryption company and over the years, we have migrated to work with biometrics as the encryption key. Biometrics help provide the strongest set of encryptions out there and we have found that there is need in the market. From that, we have pushed out products into different areas along with encryption, such as biometric authentication, biometric authentication via the web and a product soon to be announced - for e-mail encryption. Therefore, the company has grown from about five people to about twenty people to date.

FB
You mentioned a couple of your products. Could you run through your product line-up for us?

KA
The base line for the Ceelox product line is Ceelox ID. It provides for logical access to a PC or network. It is from the Ceelox ID product that we have spawned a couple of our other products, the next one being Ceelox ID Online, which allows a user to enroll and authenticate via the web which is quite different from some of our competitors. Then we have our Ceelox Vault product, which allows users to take critical information mobile by the use of a biometrically enabled storage device and we soon will have one that works on your PC or laptop as well for encrypting critical information.

FB
What are the main drivers for your solutions?

KA
The main drivers for our solutions and for Ceelox as a whole is we want to provide products for the enterprise, we want to bring technology to the enterprise for a couple of different reasons. We believe biometrics does a couple of things - yes it is secure and certainly it is more secure than usernames and passwords. However, it's also convenient and the technology has grown, developed, and matured over the last year, not to mention the last ten years.

FB
What vertical markets is Ceelox focusing on?

KA
A couple - one is the financial market, such as independent bankers and community banks. We are also focusing on the government market, the division of intelligence and the DOD. Those are two areas we will spread into over the next year.

FB
In our recent Year in Review, industry experts spoke about the need for a solutions approach to the marketplace. You have developed several products that seem to fill this need, such as your financial product Bank ID and K(id) authentication products. How do you feel about this solutions approach?

KA
I think it will work quite well. What it will take is co-operation from the banks and the people who process the bank's money. We will need their co-operation for products like Bank ID to work seamlessly. However, when it comes to the K(id) solution, which I am glad you brought up, we believe it brings an end-to-end solution for three areas. The K(id) product allows caregivers to authenticate using their fingerprint so we know who they are. It allows parents to enroll their fingerprint so we know who they are, it also allows for the child's picture to be put in and associated with the parents and caregivers fingerprints and in the future we will be able to enroll the child's fingerprint as well. So when Ceelox brings solutions like that to the market it puts us ahead because we solve three authentication problems - the caregiver, the guardians and the children. Along with that, K(id) has time and attendance as well, so the caregivers and the people who own those organizations can track the time of the child's pick-up and entry points.

FB
It is a wonderful solution! Also in our Year in Review, privacy was mentioned as a challenge that the industry will have to deal with. Do you find that you face that with your K(id) solution?

KA
We don't find it to be a stumbling block. Privacy is always going to be brought up when we try to give a biometric versus something we know. However, when we discuss it with our clients and educate them that we are not keeping the image of the fingerprint, but rather a number based on their finger and that we take very good care of that number and that we encrypt it and then rehash it and store it in a data base, they are far more comfortable with it. Biometrics is about security for sure convenience. In the case of our K(id) product, somebody walking in and placing a fingerprint down authenticating the parents along with their children or child, represents a huge benefit in cost saving and time.

FB
I couldn't agree more! And what will 2007 hold for the company, Kass?

KA
We think 2007 will be a watershed year. We have taken all the steps with our software for this year and beyond, we have added staff to ensure that we can deliver our solutions. We have also started our marketing efforts in 2007. You will also see partnerships with Ceelox and other industry leaders that have been around and successful for a while.

2007 for the biometric industry as a whole I think will be a watershed year. We are seeing more vendors take serious note of bringing good products to the market. We are seeing interoperability talked about seriously and we know that needs to happen. We believe that 2007 going into 2008 will really be positive for not only Ceelox, but for the industry as well.

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