One of the biggest trends in security and access control in recent years has been the increasing proliferation of biometrics at organizations both large and small. The technology, which had previously only been sparsely used in high-security applications, has now become more ubiquitous with the rising comfort level of consumers with fingerprint and facial recognition solutions as well as the falling prices of sensors.
The increasing popularity of biometrics has also paved the way for more companies to enter the market, looking to find a niche among some of the more well-established players in the space. Invixium, a Toronto-based developer of biometric products, is one such company and is making its North American debut at ISC West this week with the launch of its IXM TITAN solution. TITAN features facial recognition as its primary biometric modality, with fingerprint or finger vein authentication as a secondary form of authentication. TITAN also consolidates features for access control, time and attendance, video intercom and video surveillance into a single device to accommodate a variety of applications.
Invixium is headed up by CEO and President Shiraz Kapadia, who has lived through the ups and downs of the biometrics market for nearly two decades. He joined Bioscrypt in 1999 and was involved in every aspect of the company, serving as both the company’s VP of Operations and VP of Engineering. Kapadia continued on with the company after it was acquired by L-1 Identity Solutions in 2009 and eventually served as COO of the firm’s Enterprise Access Division before leaving to found Invixium in 2012.
The reason Kapadia says he was motivated to start Invixium is that he noticed the biometrics industry, particularly after Safran purchased L-1 in 2011, started to move away from physical security applications and more into national citizenship ID programs and criminal identification initiatives, thereby stymieing innovation of biometrics in access control.
“I decided to start this company in April 2012 with a sole focus on bringing modernization to this antiquated biometric access control industry,” Kapadia explains. “Biometric devices do not have to look ugly and this was the mantra under which we started Invixium. We wake up every day thinking about biometric devices and we go to bed thinking about biometric devices. We are laser-focused on this market that was basically discarded by the big (biometric) giants.”
What Makes Invixium Different?
Because consumers have access to such a wealth of information at their fingertips, Kapadia says that it is not enough to make a product that can simply perform one function better than your competitor. He continues to say that organizations today want products that can deliver added intelligence for their businesses while also combining security, convenience, style and performance in a single package.
“Whether ‘Company A’ can store 100,000 templates and ‘Company B’ can store 200,000 users or templates on their device is irrelevant to the customer. What is important now is for the technology or the product to look nice – be well-designed, simple to use and elegant – as well as robust from a security perspective,” Kapadia says. “Secondly, just talking about biometrics or a product alone is not adequate to a business owner, CSO, CEO or upper management of a company.”
Kapadia says they are often asked by prospective customers about what else their products can do besides access control and that they have designed their solutions with this in mind.
“For example, with our products, yes you can do biometric access control, but we also have sophisticated analytical engines that perform time tracking of employees, and we have cameras built into our products where you can do facial recognition and also use it for video intercom,” he adds. “Now, our value proposition is well understood by an enterprise and they say, ‘oh, wow, not only can these products be used for biometric access control but they can also do other things.’ Consolidating these other needs of the enterprise into one product is quite important in the marketplace and we’re doing exactly that.”
Adoption Trends and Challenges for Biometrics
Kapadia, like many others, credits Apple with helping to reduce some of the privacy concerns that previously existed with biometrics after they introduced a fingerprint sensor as a security feature on the iPhone 5S back in 2013.
“Adoption skyrocketed after that,” he adds. “Many of the concerns that users or corporations had about privacy and what was going to happen with fingerprint data – is it going to be given to the cops, FBI, etc. – were solved.”
Secondly, Kapadia says that many of the complexities that once existed in deploying biometric solutions have been reduced. For example, if a typical end-user wanted to use a biometric reader to safeguard their office complex, Kapadia says it was almost a “science project” to pull together.
“There were so many cooks in the kitchen if you wanted to deploy a biometric system,” he says. “No one ever argues about the benefits of using biometrics because it is so secure. It is the only technology that proves you are who you say you are and nobody can question the convenience factor because you never need a fob, card or PIN number, etc. The manufacturers, I don’t believe, are selling biometric devices at high prices, it is the channel that makes it very expensive because there are so many layers to get it integrated and then there are the maintenance costs.”
The key to overcoming this for Invixium and others in the market, according to Kapadia, is to develop solutions that are easy to use and simplify installation from a channel perspective.
“Don’t make it complicated and don’t ask the user to go buy software from one place, hardware from another place and then ask somebody else to do the install,” he says. “Try to do as much as possible to be one-stop-shop providers, partner with the right channel partners and try to give small and large enterprises easy access to the product.”
Kapadia says they made a conscious decision not to enter the North American market until they had a full product portfolio complete with case studies to ensure they would be successful once they made the move into the region.
“It was tough not to enter the North American market (until now), but this urge to have a complete portfolio, be ready and have stories to tell before we showed up at ISC West was necessary and we’ve done exactly that,” he says. “This is our sixth year in business and we didn’t focus on North America for this specific reason and so this is a really exciting time for us.”
About the Author:
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
