Smart Card Talk

October 2004 • Volume 9 Number 10

Executive Director's Letter

Dear members and friends of the Alliance,

For those of you who were expecting to receive this newsletter earlier in the month, my apologies. With so much happening the week prior to our Annual Conference and the week of the conference, something had to slip. Hopefully we will get back on schedule next month.

It is hard to capture in the limited space in this letter all that took place during last week’s 2004 Fall Annual Conference in San Francisco. The program committee delivered another first-rate conference agenda and all of the executive-level speakers from commercial and government markets and those in the industry did a fantastic job in delivering on our theme of “evolution through innovation.” The hotel ballroom was filled to capacity on Monday morning to listen to Richard Clarke, former senior security advisor to the past four presidents, address the smart card industry in his keynote address. He demonstrated a clear understanding of the core principles of why stronger identification needs to be a priority for our country and challenged the smart card industry to lead the effort to educate the public that you can have strong identification and maintain individual privacy and civil liberties. The next morning, we witnessed first-hand the tremendous power of strong authentication in a connected and wireless world. Bill Vass, newly appointed CIO at Sun Microsystems, demonstrated a radically different business and personal relationship to computing – enabled by the power of smart card technology. The speakers and panels that followed the keynotes reinforced those major themes and revealed the future of the industries we serve and the technologies we support. The conference program concluded, appropriately enough, with a Next Generation Technology Fair that included ten emerging technology and solutions firms demonstrating innovation on a range of applications from biometrics, health care, enterprise security, payments, and secure credentials.

In addition to a great educational experience, the Alliance also honored a number of individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievements over the last year or more. The venue for this recognition occurred at the Tuesday evening Awards Dinner. The evening began with the U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Association announcing the $288,000 award to the Smart Card Alliance to help increase awareness of smart cards in Latin America. This important new initiative will be a three-year cooperative project with the ITA, with details of the program to be posted on the web site shortly. Following this announcement, Kevin Gillick, returning Chair of the Smart Card Alliance, announced the newly elected board of directors and executive committee that will help shepherd the Alliance organization into its new international role. The names of the newly elected board and executive committee are listed in this month’s newsletter on the “From the Alliance Office” page.

The main event of the evening – the announcement of the 2004 Outstanding Smart Card Achievement (OSCA) awards – was preceded by two additional award ceremonies. First, the Alliance recognized and presented certificates to the most active individual and organization contributors to the task forces over the last 2 years. Eighteen individual certificates of appreciation and six organization certificates were presented. Frost & Sullivan followed with presentations to Alliance member organizations that they have recognized in the last year for market leadership based on their analyst reports. Atmel, Axalto, Gemplus, Infineon Technologies, and Oberthur Card Systems received awards from Frost & Sullivan.

The best was saved for last as I had the privilege of announcing the OSCA award nominees and winners for outstanding achievement in the smart card industry for North America. Receiving the award for individual achievement was Dan Cunningham, CEO of RAAK Technologies and a 20 year veteran of the industry. Dan is a former CEO of Gemplus Card Systems North America, founding member of the Smart Card Forum, past president of SCIA, and has held numerous leadership positions in the smart card industry. The recipient of the outstanding supplier organization went to Axalto, for its contribution to the Department of Defense Common Access Card (CAC) program, its support of numerous standards, industry organizations and conferences, and its advocacy efforts in Congress to support smart card adoption in the federal government. The outstanding end user organization award went to the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) at the Department of Defense for the CAC program, which continues to break new ground in cards issued (over 5 million), cross credentialing advances with the DCCIS program, and the contributions DMDC has made to the industry and other end users through their openness and feedback about lessons learned on their actual experiences. Look for an information page on this year’s OSCA awards recipients on the Alliance public web site very soon.

The excitement of the Annual Conference overshadowed the achievements of the Secure Personal Identification Task Force which released its newest industry report, Logical Access Security: The Role of Smart Cards in Strong Authentication. This latest industry collaboration examines the role of smart cards in logical security and includes several reference implementations that support the conclusions of the paper that strong authentication is essential for managing data and access in a digital world. The new report is available for download from the members-only web site and is available to the public through the online web store for $145.

Building on the success of the Alliance task forces, it was also announced that the Alliance Board is soliciting the formation of multiple technology-focused or market-focused “councils” to bring together committed member groups to develop focused activities around important industry topics such as RFID, biometrics, physical access, contactless payments, transit or other specialty areas. Through councils, members will have the opportunity to develop their own initiatives and deliverables and to make significant contributions to the market segments they are addressing. It is expected that these councils will foster more industry collaboration and produce tangible results to speed smart card adoption and industry growth.

And just in case you think there is time to sit back and enjoy the glory after a successful conference, you should know that I am still pushing industry outreach as I write this update letter – attending the Digital ID World conference on identity management, traveling to Paris, France for Cartes IT Security, and then getting right to work on planning the next conference, the 4th Annual Smart Cards in eGovernment Conference and Expo on March 9-11, 2005 in Washington, DC. With the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) making it official policy to adopt uniform identity credentials across the government enterprise, this conference promises to be the biggest event ever. Rest assured, the Smart Card Alliance will assemble the best the government and industry have to offer to create a great industry event. My parting words for you this month are those that ended my “State of the Alliance” address at the Annual Conference. “Be advocates of your industry, be advocates of your industry association – get active, get involved.”

Sincerely,

Randy Vanderhoof, Executive Director