Through the Safran's acquisition of the US company L-1 Identity Solutions in July 2011, Morpho has strengthened its access control terminal offering. Marie Garmendia, VP Sales & Marketing, Identification Division, explains how.

What does the integration of L-1's biometric terminal business bring to the table for Morpho?
It should be remembered that L-1 acquired this business by buying out the Canadian company Bioscrypt who boasted a 400-customer portfolio and an installed base of almost half a million access control terminals and modules. By taking this branch on board, Morpho is expanding its market, particularly in the United States. It is also a way of enhancing our range of services with complementary technologies such as face recognition which L-1 was working on. Morpho on the other hand had already launched the first terminal combining fingerprint and vein pattern recognition in 2009. The combination of these three technologies will strengthen our multi-biometric packages in the future. Finally, this union gives us an opportunity to compare different product approaches, which is always beneficial. We shall now be integrating the American PIV [1] and TWIC [2] standards into the design of products that previously we were developing primarily for markets outside the US.

And Morpho's customers?
They have access to a broader range of technologies. As for Bioscrypt's customers, they are also assured of benefiting in time from the best products on the market in terms of digital recognition as our authentication algorithms and sensors were ranked number one by the National Institute of Standards & Technology in the spring of 2011. Finally, we are working on convergent products to guarantee the sustainability of the investments they have already made.

What challenges lie ahead?
The fact that our two activities are built on the same business model, and especially on the same partner profiles for our distributors and integrators, has facilitated their convergence. The main challenges ahead rather involve operational implementation. By this, I mean the homogenization of computer tools (order management, procurement, production, etc.). Our objective is to guarantee L-1's customers the quality of service enjoyed by Morpho's customers. We began by integrating Bioscrypt's customer and product catalogs into our information system. We then harmonized the commercial and industrial processes. A few pilot customers were chosen to validate the operation of the new order management system. As for the after-sales service, integration is still a work in progress. At the same time, team transfers began in September 2011 on a voluntary basis with skills also a major factor of consideration. This transition phase is due to be completed during the summer of 2012.

[1] Personal Identity Verification

[2] Transportation Worker Identification Credential