Gemplus and Schlumberger have given the smart card industry a big push in the direction of standardization.
Together responsible for a majority of chip card production, the two France-based organizations announced the formation a week ago of the Java Card Forum. It will promote Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java computing language as the basis for a standard operating system.
Card technology experts-and a high-powered group of endorsers led by Visa International-suggest Java and the forum could go a long way toward smoothing out the technical differences among system suppliers. As a result, costs of adoption could fall, helping smart cards to make some of their long-awaited gains.
"This is the most significant move in smart cards in the last five years," said Jerome Svigals, a Redwood City, Calif., consultant.
Mr. Svigals, who at International Business Machines Corp. had a hand in creating the magnetic stripe encoding method that memory chips are designed to replace, said a Java standard could have the same effect that a single specification had in making magnetic stripes ubiquitous since the 1970s.
"This breakthrough will give banks the ability to order cards from any supplier without worrying about compatibility of operating systems," Mr. Svigals said.
"The Java Card Forum signals the maturation of the smart card industry and, beyond that, the universe of smart-card-based businesses," said Jean- Paul Bize, vice president of Schlumberger Electronic Transactions. "The Java Card standard will help smart cards gain critical mass (and) assure the marketability" of applications across banking, retailing, telecommunications, health care, and other sectors.
"We plan to be a catalyst and active participant," said Francois Dutray, group executive vice president of Visa International. He said he expects the effort to let Visa banks "move quickly to develop and deliver innovative solutions, thus enabling their differentiation in the marketplace."
Mike Inglis, worldwide smart card operations manager at Motorola Inc., another forum supporter, said greater compatibility would "revolutionize the smart card market (and) give developers the freedom to create a myriad of new applications."
The forum grew out of several of these companies' involvement with Java Card API-the application programming interface that Sun Microsystems launched last October. Schlumberger quickly followed by announcing its Java-based Cyberflex product line.
With the forum announcement last week, licenses for Cyberflex and Gemplus' compatible JCOS1 Java Card API were made available to other companies in hopes of spawning interoperable, multiapplication card innovations.
Gemplus chairman Marc Lassus called it "a small step for the Java universe" but a big advance toward giving "individual consumers equal access to the cyber-economy."
Sun encourages efforts like the Java Card Forum to help realize its vision of Java as a de facto Internet technology standard with uncommon scalability-capable of running on computing devices of any size. Smart cards would be among the smaller and more portable such devices. Sun and Oracle Corp., another forum supporter, have demonstrated network computers, so-called thin clients connected to high-powered server networks, that have smart card readers for security and money-transmission purposes.
"Java is a powerful tool for the creation of software in cards," said Patrice Peyret, president of Integrity Arts Inc., a Silicon Valley system integration company and spinoff of Gemplus. "But its use must be harmonized with the experience of the card industry."
