The future IDX competitors are beginning to emerge.
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"The PC maker Acer announced in April that it would use Veridicom's chip in its newest TravelMate notebook computer, which is expected to go into production early this year. Hewlett-Packard and Dell are also testing the product."
Although Acer is an insignificant player in the PC market, HP and Dell are majors. It is a certainty that the IDT product, already accepted by Compaq, is also being evaluated by other majors. Although silicon is the newer technology, it's not at all clear whether it is cheaper or better. In some ways, it is fragile. It can be disrupted by a discharge of static electricity, and the chip itself can be broken if something drops on it. We still haven't seen a chip-based product priced competitively to the $99 IDT product.
In another arena, the recent Schlumberger alliance for biometric smart cards is a clear competitor to the IDT smart card alliance, which seems a bit further along in pilots.
IDX's old competitors, like Fingermatrix and NRID, are gone or going. Their hard-pressed tenprint competitors -- DBII and Printrak -- are becoming less and less strategically significant. The new competitors are Lucent spinoffs or Schlumbergers. It's a sign that IDX is now playing in the big leagues for big markets. It's a sign the company is moving up. |
