Printrak International Inc, Anaheim, California, the fingerprint identification system specialist which spun off from London-based printing systemsgroup De La Rue Plc in a two-stage management buy-out completed in June last year, has been staging a turnaround, and is about to set up a subsidiary in the UK, hoping to follow up a recent order from Kent Constabulary with more of the same kind. The company completed the first stage of its management buyout in May 1990, gaining the rights to the company and the rights to market its products in North America (CI No 1,440). According to Dave McNeff, vice-president of marketing and sales in Anaheim, the business had run into problems back in 1987, over-committing itself to too many large contracts, on which it was unable to deliver. As a result, the company suffered two years of financial difficulties – losses, but McNeff couldn’t say how serious they were – and De La Rue was under pressure to put the company up for sale.
Unisys
As it turned out, Unisys Corp was the only potential buyer that came along – this was in early 1989 – but discussions between Unisys and Printrak’s UK parent broke down due to Unisys’s own financial instability at that time. Since no further offers were forthcoming, De La Rue had no option but to hang on to the fingerprint recognition system business for a bit longer. In May 1990, De La Rue financially supported the buy-out with a UKP55m writedown, so apparently desperate was it to get rid of the ailing US company, but it had to retain European marketing rights to Printrak’s products, since there were still some problems with outstanding contracts which needed to be tied up. So it wasn’t until last June that Printrak completed its buyout, gaining international marketing rights to its products. Richard Giles, now president of Printrak, led the buyout and now owns the majority of the privately-held company’s shares. Printrak turned in profits of some $1.5m for the year to March 1991, on sales of $22m. McNeff says that profit was relatively small because the company was still turning itself around during that year. The turnaround involved a large reduction in debt – McNeff couldn’t say how large these debts had once been, but said that they had now been eliminated, leaving Printrak with more than sufficient cash. The company, which has 165 employees and field service offices in Washington DC, Denver, Colorado and a small services set-up in Basingstoke, UK, says it has taken a while for the sales pipeline to fill up, but this has now been achieved, and a steady stream of contracts are reported to be coming through, including the Kent Constabulary contract and a major upgrade in Houston, Texas next week.
By Sue Norris
The company specialises in packaged fingerprint recognition systems, based around Digital Equipment Corp hardware – MicroVAX II processors, currently being migrated to DECstation 4000 and 5000 systems. McNeff describes Printrak’s systems – Orion, and little brother Hunter – as comprising three basic components: the workstation, which forms the operator interface, for fingerprint encoding and general input; a modular search-match hardware-software portion for filtering data using scripter information, for example the sex and race of the suspect; and an image storage and retrieval system, where the records are stored. Printrak’s technical contribution to the system is an image processor which sits inside the DEC workstation, and matchers for the search-match system. Orion, Printrak’s original large system, stores between 80,000 and 2.5m records, which are compressed at a rate of 10,000 bytes per fingerprint image and held on optical disk – each disk holding some 250Gb of data. Until recently, Printrak procured its optical disk technology from Mountain View, California-based Optimem, an Archive Corp company, and used San Jose-based Cygnet Systems Inc’s jukebox systems. But now, the company is moving from Optimem to Laser Memory Systems Inc systems. Hunter is a smaller version of Orion, launched this time last year (CI No 1,657).
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This system is already built around the DECstation 4000 and 5000 series machines, aimed at medium and smaller agencies, storing up to 80,000 records. Printrak reckons the Hunter system will be its competitive edge, since it costs considerably less than current offerings, starting at $350,000 and ranging up to $500,000 – Orion, meanwhile, ranges from $900,000 to several millions of dollars. Asked about the competition, McNeff says Printrak has two real rivals – NEC Corp and French company Morpho Systemes SA, which has a subsidiary, NAMSI, in North America. Printrak claims some 90 installations worldwide, 50 of them with associated databases, the balance hooked up to remote databases. McNeff reckons NEC has a similar number of installations, with Morpho dragging behind with under 30. Nine of Printrak’s systems are in European installations, but it seems that the company is particularly successful in Canada. According to McNeff, Fingermatrix Inc, of North White Plains, New York, is not a competitor and Printrak does not come up against the firm when bidding for contracts. He explains that Fingermatrix, to his knowledge, does not have the capability to compare fingerprints with those stored on a database; the New York company’s system is a live-scan machine, taking its impressions directly from the finger, not via an ink print. Fingermatrix’s business, McNeff says, is more in good-quality fingerprint image input, for laser reproduction on card. What does the future hold? Printrak aims to sell aggressively into Europe, the US and Canada, and plans to update Orion to DEC’s Unix environment.
