Microsoft Corp. last week announced plans to enter the smart-card market with a new standards-based operating system called Smart Cards for Windows.
The system will allow smart-card developers to take advantage of a common run-time environment, a language-neutral development environment and familiar tools such as the Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C++ development systems, said the company.
About 1.1 billion smart cards were in use last year, mainly in Europe under government programs or for banking. The industry’s growth, said Microsoft, has been hampered by fragmentation that has resulted in several proprietary systems that make it difficult to develop applications that can be deployed widely.
The potential market for smart cards is huge with a consumer push toward consolidating a variety of credit and other cards onto a single smart card that could use wireless phones as a conduit. The market for smart card units is expected to reach 2.7 billion by 2003, said Ovum Ltd., an independent research and consulting company.
A beta version of Smart Cards for Windows is scheduled to be available in January.
Microsoft made the announcement at the smart card industry’s Cartes ’98 conference in Paris. Other announcements made at the show include a new suite of smart-card product platforms introduced by Motorola Inc.’s Worldwide Smartcard Solutions Division.
Motorola’s new M-Smart platform solutions include the M-Smart Venus Platform, which is a microprocessor-based platform ideal for building multi-application solutions with advanced memory and processing capabilities, said Motorola.
Using the Venus platform, application developers could program multi-application smart cards to support two or more applications. Customers could both talk on their wireless phone and conduct financial transactions, such as transferring money between accounts and downloading funds to the card, said the company.
In the wireless arena, smart cards are associated mainly with Global System for Mobile communications networks in Europe. Using a Subscriber Identity Module card, customers can roam onto GSM networks in other markets that operate at different frequencies.
Because customer information is stored on smart cards, companies like Schlumberger Smart Cards & Terminals see a wider opportunity for smart cards than just facilitating roaming. The company introduced a suite of smart-card products and services for the North American market. The Java-based system allows carriers to instantly provide a variety of value-added services to customers.
“The limitation of the current industry is everybody is talking about value-added services to increase the bottom line,” said Sami Nassar, director, Telecom, at Schlumberger Smart Cards & Terminals. “They need to differentiate by adding usage and loyalty programs to reduce churn.”
One application that could be made possible by smart cards, said Nassar, is a loyalty program that would allow customers to accumulate points for each minute of airtime they use. Those points then could be cashed in for free airtime or discounts on a variety of other products similar to frequent flyer programs.
Nassar said these types of applications are just the beginning of trend in the telecommunications industry that increasingly could rely on smart cards to store critical customer information that will be used in a variety of applications.
