Bull aims for lion's share of smartcard market

IT services company Bull plans to conquer 50 per cent of the smartcard market within five years, according to David Levy, CEO at Bull's Smartcards and terminals division.

Speaking at the launch of the company's latest software for smartcard developers, Levy said the company's newest 32bit architecture, called Zeplatform, will enable users to build a wider range of applications for banking and administration cards. Levy said: "We invested early in 32bit technology and we want 500 million smartcards to be developed with Zeplatform. All the engines for smartcards are the same but this changes the way people develop applications specific smartcards." Zeplatform is based on modular architecture that enables developers to component build. Levy added: "Modular building is not currently possible because of the size of the chip so developers end up writing in spaghetti code. But modular means users can write code into applications which can function by themselves as opposed to one mass, so you can add functions as you go."