A WSJ interview with Marc Talbot, SchlumbergerSema’s business-development manager for IT Network Smart Cards:
We are seeing very good growth in the smart-card market for the workplace. Companies are trying to do the combination of physical and logical access and we’ve seen major deployments in Asia, North America and Europe.
I think that trend will certainly continue.
What might be more interesting is the growth of the smart card in the home. Smart cards until very recently had suffered from the same problems that digital-video-disc manufacturers had suffered five years ago. Back then, DVD manufacturers said, “Well, we’d sell more DVD players, if there were more DVD movies around.” Movie companies said, “Well, we’d make more DVD movies available, if there were more DVD players out there.”Smart cards have been suffering from much the same problem, in the sense that people come up with good applications for smart cards for the home user, but they can’t deploy them unless they put a reader in the PC and most PCs don’t have smart card readers because there aren’t any interesting applications for smart cards.
Future smart cards will no longer need a reader to hook up to the PC. They’ll hook up through a very inexpensive connector and that’s really going to open up opportunities for smart cards in the home
In 2001, SchlumbergerSema shipped 198 million smart cards, about 29% of the world’s total.
Smart Cards could be a useful mechanism for authentication for Thin Clients (SunRay does this).
