Feature Company

Interview with DigitalPersona - George Skaff, Vice President, Marketing
July 2007

FB

Overall how would you rate your company's performance this past year and what influenced that performance?

DP

Our company's performance is exceeding market expectations and market growth, and the major contributing factor is our consistent delivery of productivity tools for enterprise and our solid partnerships with our Developers and OEM partners that have helped them grow their business and consequently grow our business.

FB

You will be holding your second developer summit in San Francisco in October of this year. Can you elaborate on this?

DP

Actually, this is back by popular demand! We had our first summit last year in November in Philadelphia and we were quite pleased that we exceeded our goal of companies attending. This summit is tailored to our existing developer partners and some potential partners as well. It is not for the public or enterprise companies; it is for those partners that need to get some of the more technical knowledge about our products. They can be from the SDK side (software development kits) or some of the hardware modules. This is a 2 days event where developers have access to our engineers and we share our 6 to 9 month road map and they share their plans.

Developers of applications, tools, and products will be coming from all over the world to discuss how to develop, market, and enhance their product with fingerprint enabled biometric solutions. Leaders in the fingerprint biometric field will be detailing their solutions and show the increase in their company's revenue. In addition, this Summit will focus on developer-centric discussions about DigitalPersona software, readers, algorithms, and tools.

FB

Face to face exchange is invaluable, congratulations on the summit's success. You have also been working with Lending Tools.com and their efforts to meet the FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Counsel) guidelines dictating multifactor security for online financial transactions. Can you elaborate on that?

DP

Lending tools used DigitalPersona's solutions and were able to meet the FFIEC regulations ahead of the deadline because they provided a 3 factor authentication of the financial transaction between their institution and their customers. LendingTools.com uses DigitalPersona's solution on the server-side, the online environment and the workstation side.

FB

You recently released a new research study that, Reveals Password Vulnerabilities and Concerns: Sharing and Abuse Are Common and Can Be Disastrous. Can you tell us a bit about this?

DP

Often we are asked by customers to share some data with them about what is happening in the market with regards to passwords and password utilization. So we commissioned the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum to conduct a survey asking about vulnerability, usage and risk of using passwords in the enterprise. The results were surprising because while people are aware that passwords are risky to use, companies have insufficient polices in place to curb that behavior and offer solutions to address that.

Another component that we wanted some data on was the popularity of the latest models of Notebooks by major manufacturers with embedded fingerprint readers, because companies buying new Notebooks for enterprise use will likely get one with an embedded fingerprint reader. Unfortunately, the survey revealed that there is a high likelihood that the fingerprint reader are being turned off because the IT administrator does not want to deploy something that is secure at the individual level, but cannot be managed at the server level since the software that comes with these notebooks is tailored to personal usage only.

Because of this survey, we have recently announced that we will provide the DigitalPersona® Pro Reader Compatibility Wizard, free of charge, as a downloadable utility. The DigitalPersona Pro Reader Compatibility Wizard enables users to quickly verify if DigitalPersona Pro software supports their notebooks with third party embedded fingerprint readers. The new compatibility wizard is a step towards optimizing the utilization of notebooks with existing biometrics hardware, and confirms an embedded fingerprint reader's compatibility with DigitalPersona Pro for Active Directory and Pro Kiosk client software before having to actually install the software. The new solution also makes it easy for IT administrators to test whether DigitalPersona Pro supports their hardware, thus maintaining their investment in the hardware without the need to purchase additional fingerprint readers.

This solution allows the IT administrator to monitor, enforce policies and have an audit trail for regulatory compliance.

FB

At the 2007 International CES in Las Vegas, Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of the Microsoft® Fingerprint Reader* with software updates from DigitalPersona Inc., for Windows Vista™ compatibility, offering users the convenience of replacing their passwords with their fingerprint, and easily managing the import or export of passwords across multiple computers. Can you tell us more about this?

DP

As you know, DigitalPersona provides Microsoft with the hardware and software to offer their branded fingerprint reader in the consumer channels. The announcement at the CES show reflected their continued commitment to offer readers and updated software for convenience and added security. The software, labeled Password Manager 2.0, is an updated revision to what they had and has been developed to make the user accounts in Windows Vista more convenient for individuals and families by eliminating the need to remember and type account passwords when using Vista features such as the new Parental Controls.

FB

In terms of new product development, what can we expect to see from DigitalPersona in the future? I know, for example, that you have a new Ergonomic Keyboard with Built-in Fingerprint Reader.

DP

That was announced a few months ago, our Fingerprint Keyboard has a new ergonomic design and built-in DigitalPersona placement optical reader. This allows users to minimize the number of peripheral devices connected to the desktop. We continue to target corporate enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses worldwide, including commercial industries in finance and banking, healthcare, retail, and state and local government. We are upgrading all of our software and SDKs to be Vista compatible, and are addressing not only the Windows platform but adding support for Linux and other environments.

On the hardware side, we are testing new concepts that will allow us to offer more reliable and durable readers in new innovative form/factor.

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