Biometrics customers are increasingly basing their purchase decision on product reliability and customer support

(03/03/2009)

Biometrics has rapidly emerged as a reliable and robust answer to the identity challenges of the 21st century. The use of biometric technology is fast gaining prominence in the commercial sector with time and attendance and physical access control being the primary drivers.

Recent surveys indicate that the acceptance of the use of biometrics (fingerprint) grew to approximately 67% worldwide. With the increasing proliferation of the technology, the market recently has seen a sharp increase in the number of vendors offering a range of low cost biometric hardware and software products.

The flooding of the market with low cost biometric hardware has in many ways created a dilemma for the biometric OEMs and distributors alike – balancing customer expectations with the quality and cost. While the short term benefits of these products are lower upfront costs whether they offer any long term benefits still remains to be seen.

Besides the upfront hardware and software costs the life cycle costs of a biometric solution can be attributed to a number of factors including product longevity, day to day convenience of use (having low failures to enroll (FTE), False Accept Rates (FAR), False Reject Rates (FRR) etc), existing support infrastructure and more importantly compliance with industry and government standards.

Quality and cost have more often than not been tightly linked – a recent customer survey carried out by Simply Biometrics a supply chain expert in biometrics industry indicates that cost of the product by itself is not the only purchase factor; customers are increasingly basing their purchase decision on product reliability and available customer support.

Simply Biometrics Sales Manager, Michael Connolly said “We have made a deliberate decision to only offer biometric hardware and software from the leading and trusted names in the biometric industry. Our range of products meets the industry and government standards, benefit from excellent support network and offer very high levels of data integrity. Besides these we only offer products our product engineering team is fully trained on allowing us to offer excellent second line support”.

Simply Biometrics has been working with the leading OEMs in the biometric industry to assist in market led product development and pricing strategy of biometric hardware and software. Getting the balance of quality and cost will be critical towards ensuring that the trust of end users in the technology is not lost. Simply Biometrics offers a complete range of biometric hardware and software products for time and attendance and physical access control solutions from leading names in the industry including Sagem Security, L1 Identity/Bioscrypt, Fujitsu, IR Recognition Systems, Precise Biometrics, Hitachi etc.

Related topics:  Eye biometrics   Face biometrics   Fingerprint biometrics   Hand biometrics   Other biometric systems   Voice biometrics 

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