Donegal on biometric map

Software developers in Donegal will have the opportunity to work for one of the biggest specialist IT companies providing a range of technology services and software to the airline industry.

SITA Incorporated, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, plans to hire an extra 120 people for its existing office in Letterkenny by 2007. The development centre will work on a range of projects from state-of-the-art passenger identity systems using biometric technologies to airline booking engines for websites.

"Letterkenny will become one of SITA's premier global software centres now along with its offices in Atlanta and London," says Michael Cunningham, director of SITA's Irish operation, which also has a Dublin office.

"One of the main reasons we picked Donegal was availability of staff. There is only one other big technology firm in Letterkenny, Prumerica, so there is less people competing for staff."

Cunningham, who is a native of Donegal, initially established a Letterkenny office for the Dublin based firm Eland Technologies, which was later acquired by SITA in the summer of 2003.

"Letterkenny is not a low cost location such as India or eastern Europe but it has advantages over the off-shoring model," he says.

"We investigated setting up these centres as part of an analysis of off-shoring. But you need a project of a bigger size to make it worthwhile. There are costs involved with managing these operation in offshore locations."

Grant aid from IDA Ireland and the flexibility of the educational institutes in Donegal are also important factors for SITA. There are institutes of technology in Sligo and Letterkenny as well as the Magee campus of the University of Ulster in Derry, says Cunningham, who notes that Letterkenny IT is prepared to tailor its courses to meet the needs of big local employers.

SITA's Letterkenny office has also proved its effectiveness by taking part in major projects such as its new mobile check-in technology, biometrics projects, and a border control management for the Canadian government.

The border control project, which is called i-detect Canada, will enable the customs authorities to profile passengers prior to their arrival in Canada. The technology system, which is being designed by SITA and several partners, works by combining passenger and flight data from a number of different sources to provide the authorities with clear and detailed records for each passengers on each incoming flight, ahead of arrival, says Thomas Marten, vice president of SITA's government and security competence division based in Geneva.

"The system automates the collection and formatting data from passenger records and airline reservation systems. Much of this data is held by old legacy IT systems and has to be translated into a standard XML format for use by the agencies," he says.

SITA has had to tailor the Canadian system to meet strict privacy and data protection laws, which mean that only certain passenger information can be shared such as name, passport number and date of birth. Other more detailed information held by airlines on passengers can be filtered by the system before it is passed to the authorities, says Marten, who is involved in ongoing discussions with various governments on border control and biometrics security.

This type of controlled use of passenger data may also help to gain greater acceptance of the use of the new generation of biometric systems that are being introduced by airlines, according to Marten, who cites the example of the European Commission's recent "s-Travel" pilot project using biometrics that encountered privacy concerns.

The "s-Travel" initiative, in which SITA was a member, used smart cards with embedded biometric data to provide an electronic screening system to enable frequent flyers to be get fast-track processing through airports. The pilot encountered difficulties with European laws regarding data protection - the main problem is who had access to the personal data on the smart cards - and problems of co-ordination between different EU countries, according to Marten.

The SITA system under development for the Canadian authorities promises to alleviate these privacy concerns by filtering out some personal data, he says.

SITA and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) are also co-developing a system with public key infrastructure (PKI) technology to help boost privacy. It works by encrypting personal data held on travel documents, such as a smart card or passport, so that no central database of personal information is required to help identify individuals. Instead, a scanner at the airport would send a signal to a central database containing a secure key to access the data held on the smart card, says Marten, who believes this could remove some of the privacy concerns with biometrics.

SITA, which was set up by the airline industry after the second World War to provide a common network for airlines, has also teamed up with the Irish firm Daon to work on biometric frequent flier pilots at US airports.

"We already have a pilot system up and running in three US airports with Daon and are bidding for a new project in Florida, which is a public private partnership programme using biometrics," says Marten, who plans to meet with Daon while he is in Dublin for SITA's jobs announcement.