Company to provide platform for matching biometrics as stage in broader programme
The Home Office has gone public with a contract with Fujitsu Services as a central element of its biometrics programme.
The company has won a five-year, £28 million deal, that could be extended for another three years, to develop a platform for matching biometrics along with associated services.
It will incorporate a service bus, biometric workflow, service interface, matching engine software and an infrastructure platform. Other elements of the deal include services around design, technical specifications and roadmaps, and the operation of biometric accuracy testing.
A contract for the second part of the plan under the same procurement notice, for biometric matching algorithms to be integrated into the platform, is still to be awarded. It could be worth almost as much as the first contract.
IT analyst TechMarketView pointed out that Fujitsu Services has a long running relationship with the Home Office through the Sirius infrastructure services contract, which dates back to 2000, and has been involved in a number of pilot projects using its digital capabilities.
The department is also looking to consolidate its biometrics systems with a new platform that will bring together the IDENT 1 fingerprint system and the Immigration and Asylum Biometric System (IABS) when the relevant contracts expire in March and April 2019 respectively.
Image from Jan Kalab, CC BY 2.0 through flickr
