<<What this solicitation does show, however, is that the government is expecting the various systems and databases to be able to interact with one another or they will take the sole source route.>>
As you know, NEC is the AFIS provider for the State of California. Building from that base, they became AFIS provider for the Western Identification Network which has been in existence for some years. The existence of WIN, plus 6 or so of the largest states, is a reason NEC has a database of more fingers than any other supplier. Scratch that -- the database is NOT NEC's database, and they can't tinker with it. The database is WIN's.
WIN's major facility is in Sacramento, just a few blocks down the road from the Cal DOJ building. The customers have been pleased with the capabilities. There probably are very few examples of this many States working together, cooperatively. Wyoming, for example, sends its prints to WIN for searches and doesn't have to pay to have a system of its own. Also, through WIN Wyoming has access to the criminal prints of someone who may have been arrested in any of the other WIN states. With IDX (and other) scanners, the fingerprint cards no longer have to be inked, improving precision of matching. If it's a critical case and WIN has no match, the finger images can then be sent to FBI with a request for a search.
It would be good for IDX to keep treating NEC as a very, very important customer, and I'm sure they are treating them so. |
