Bull to launch Java smart card

PARIS (12/17/97) — Groupe Bull SA will rival the Java offerings of its competitors Schlumberger SA and Gemplus SA when it unveils its own Java smart card early next year, but Bull’s sales development director for personal transaction systems, Kazem Aminaee, is cautious about the role smart cards will play in IT systems in the near term.

Bull plans to take a slightly different Java strategy from Gemplus, which this October announced it will manufacture a Java-based smart card with a 32-bit microprocessor. Bull’s Java card, which it will officially unveil at a smart card show in London in February, will probably stick with the 8-bit chip used on Bull’s and its competitors’ current smart card offerings, said Aminaee.

Rather than moving from an 8-bit to a 32-bit processor, the company instead will ramp up the smart card’s RAM — which Java has a tendency to devour. Currently Bull’s cards have 256 bytes of RAM, and Bull is working with its component supplier SGS-Thomson Microelectronics SA eventually to bump up the card’s RAM to 1 kilobyte, said Aminaee.

Bull is taking this strategy because of the difficulty and expense involved in manufacturing 32-bit smart cards, Aminaee said. Bull’s main concern is to keep the Java smart card cheap, he added, although the company also is working on a 32-bit card that will probably be ready in 1999.

Smart card market intelligence

The bulk of smart card sales today come from products ranging from memory cards, such as telephone cards, to smart cards used in GSM phones to credit cards that sport microprocessors. Only 1 percent of smart card sales are attributed to high-end smart cards used in electronic commerce and for authenticating access to IT systems, said Aminaee. Such high-end smart cards, of which Bull’s Java card will be an example, are best suited for electronic commerce because they can generate dynamic digital signatures and make use of public key algorithms.

Customers for high-end cards include the Swedish post office, whose customers use the cards to digitally sign for financial transactions made by telephone, said Aminaee.

Bull had hoped that by 2000, high-end smart cards would make up 10 percent of the overall market, but Aminaee now thinks it will take longer for them to capture such a large share, in part because electronic commerce is not catching on as quickly as the IT industry had hoped and because the cards remain relatively expensive.

Still, that does not mean that Bull lacks optimism about smart cards’ role in IT security systems and electronic commerce in the longer term. Aminaee compared today’s smart card industry with the PC industry of the mid-1980s: The cards’ capacity is increasing, the prices of smartcards and their readers are falling, and a wider range of applications are becoming possible as companies within the industry get together to hammer out standards that will let cards and readers interoperate — not only with each other, but also with PCs and network computers.

The French company, which makes money from selling a smart card operating system, fears competition from IT companies such as Microsoft Corp. much more than from other smart card manufacturers, added Aminaee. Not only have IT companies such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Co. (which this year bought the U.S. company VeriFone Inc.) become involved in the smart card business, but they also pull a lot of weight. Already, unlike Bull, Schlumberger, or Gemplus, IBM managed to push its way into the closed German smart card market largely because of its international clout, Aminaee said.

Bull’s Personal Transaction Systems Division can be reached at +33-1- 39-36-44-00. Bull can be found on the World Wide Web at https://www.bull.com.