Headline

December 7, 2006: Next week, the Federal Government will provide briefings for industry and the community on the new heath and social services access card. For vendors in the smart card space, it’s the Australian opportunity they all want to jump on board.

Joe Hockey, the Minister for Human Services made the announcement last week as a means to inform the IT industry on the project prior to the impending tenders for the project being released. Vendors will hear from government representatives at the Sydney Exhibition Centre, while the government releases its draft legislation on the project.

It’s all part of the $1.1 billion roll-out scheme scheduled to start up in 2008. The cards are designed to replace 17 health and social services cards and potentially include stored information such as allergies, contact details and other materials relevant to the user.

During the announcement, Hockey said the briefing demonstrated the government’s commitment to ensure consumer groups, industry and the public are informed on the proposal. “I am inviting interested parties to attend an industry briefing on procurement activities,” he said. “The industry briefing will provide information to companies interested in responding to upcoming tenders dealing with the development and implementation of the access card.”

One vendor attending will be Sony. With a strong hand already in on the Asian market, the vendor is interested in similar opportunities in Australia. Adam Faulkner, Sony Australia smart card product manager says Sony will be there to provide support wherever they can. “We’re willing to provide advice and knowledge on what we know about the technology,” he says. “At this point, we have simply just responded to a government draft response for the healthcare card.”

Faulkner points to Sony’s successful large-scale roll-outs overseas to demonstrate the experience of the company in the smart card space. By participating in a 7 million smart card roll-out program in Singapore and a 12 million program in Hong Kong, the vendor says it can bring a vast amount of experience to the table, especially with its FeliCa branded contactless smart card chip. “We offer a solution that is working in South East Asia,” he says. “We are making the government aware of this and providing our expertise where we can.”

So besides the government proposed access card, is there a space for smart card technology in Australia? “There’s certainly a market in Australia,” says Faulkner. “What form that takes depends on what happens in the future. We do recognise that it is a fairly new technology.”

If Sony is to tender on the project, one point they might be demonstrating is that their new FeliCa branded cards now contain 51 percent vegetable-based materials. It’s innovation that Sony says is great news for the environment with reduced consumption of exhaustible resources in the card. “These cards reduce the potential for greenhouse gases during productivity,” says Faulkner. “The company policy is to go green and as environmentally sensitive as possible.”

Worldwide, there are more then 100 million FeliCa branded cards in circulation. According to Sony, its key to success can be found in FeliCa’s ability to enable multi-applications on the one card. Globally the cards are used for diverse operations such as identification, e-Trade, transport ticketing, e-Commerce and membership/reward schemes.

Sony Australia recently announced it had more then doubled the storage capacity of its FeliCa branded contactless IC smart card chip. The new technology increase memore on the chip from four to nine kilobytes and provides for improves processing speed of 424kbps.

Comment on this story.