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Biometrics is the place to be

The biometrics industry is showing good growth and is expected to more than double by 2013.

The global security industry is a good place to be doing business in the 21st century. Even countries without the runaway crime rate South Africa is afflicted with are spending more on security.

One of the ways in which technology is being employed to beat criminals is biometrics. Of course, biometric technology is used in more than anti-crime initiatives, it is more popular than ever for access control, in identity documents and to verify financial transactions and so forth.

"Over the next five years the effort to create standards for biometrics technologies will be rewarded with a significant growth in biometrics system adoption," says Jonathan Collins, principal analyst at ABI Research. ABI estimates that global spending on biometrics will increase from 2008's $3 billion to around $7,3 billion by 2013.

In a recent report, ABI Research states that growth will be driven by "increased emphasis on security in both the public and private sectors but it will be underpinned by a raft of technology standards that have enabled more interoperable systems to emerge".

Biometric vendors with an eye on the future are no longer creating proprietary systems that lock customers into one provider, but are promoting open standards to allow for multivendor and multiple technologies to interoperate seamlessly. The focus is not on forcing customers to use your product for legacy reasons, but to provide the service and value that makes them choose your company above others.

While various other forms of biometrics, such as face, iris, hand, and speech recognition systems are growing in popularity, fingerprints will remain dominant for the foreseeable future because of the ease of taking the measurement and the improved accuracy available in new readers. This is borne out by the dominance of fingerprint technologies in Hi-Tech Security Solutions' biometric roundup.

We will, however, see an increase in the use of no-hassle biometrics, such as speech recognition in the coming years for authentication purposes, although speech will unlikely be used as a primary identification mechanism.

The key for biometrics players over the course of the next few years is quality, reliability and interoperability. As happens in most industries, it is not going to be the fanciest toys that win, but those that focus on delivering continual value-add to their customers.

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