From theregister.com
The UK’s Home Office has handed IBM a £54.7 million ($70 million) contract to work on the biometric matcher platform to support its police and immigration services in identifying suspects against a database of fingerprint and photo data.
Big Blue’s deal is to provide the Matcher Service Platform (MSP), which includes a “service bus” to provide biometric transaction processing logic, biometric workflow rules, integration of matching engine software (MES) and a service interface used by external subsystems”, according to an official notice.
The American tech biz will also create an infrastructure platform to host and provide the computing capacity for these services.
The contract, which set to run for a five-year term with an option to extend for a further three years, will transition and manage the existing Matcher Platform, built by Fujitsu, as well as creating new search capabilities and the decommissioning of legacy algorithms for a police service biometric data service IDENT1 and the immigration and asylum biometric information system (IABS).