Tech company finds success is in the cards

Locally made equipment will check the identities of those entering the country.
& lt;a href=mailto:shilling@vindy.com & gt;By DON SHILLING & lt;/a & gt;
VINDICATOR BUSINESS EDITOR
BROOKFIELD -- A tiny Brookfield company is positioned to be on the front line of homeland defense.
Zerco Systems International is preparing to supply border checkpoints in the southern United States with terminals to read new high-technology identification cards.
The federal government has issued millions of cards to foreigners who are permanent residents here or who travel in and out of the country for work, said John Soltesz, Zerco chief executive.
The cards appear like an ID card on the front, but the back looks and acts like a compact disc. Optical memory technology allows the reflective material to be burned with vast amounts of information, including fingerprints, photos and dates and times of entry to the country.
The government began issuing the cards in the late 1990s but didn't provide for a way to read the information on the cards, Soltesz said. Border guards simply look to see if a person matches the photo on the card.
Changes since 9/11
That is changing because of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Soltesz said that this week the government selected Information Spectrum Inc. of Annandale, Va., to provide the first round of 1,000 terminals to read the cards by matching fingerprints.
Zerco has a subcontractor's agreement to provide terminals to ISI and will learn in a few weeks how many it will provide, Soltesz said.
Soltesz expects this deal to be just the beginning of larger orders for his company.
The new U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a program to install this technology in all airports, border crossings, seaports and other sensitive locations.
Soltesz is so passionate about his company's terminals that he thinks it could grab a large part of those orders.
The company used to have 20 employees but reduced that to three a few years ago. It relies on contract workers to come into its Brookwood Drive office when needed to develop software or assemble terminals.
That operation is about to change because of ISI's federal contract.
Planning to move
Soltesz said he is moving the company to Canfield by the end of next month to provide more room for the assembly operations. He expects the company to employ between 50 and 100 people by the end of 2005.
Workers take a card-reading device supplied by another company and combine it with a power source, a computer motherboard and other devices that allow it to scan fingerprints, verify signatures, print out reports and other functions.
One of Zerco's patents protects its method of combining the card reader with a computer into a compact device, called a biometric verification system.
Besides changing company operations, the order validates the patience of investors who have been backing Zerco and its dreams since 1990.
Loyal investors
Soltesz said investors have stayed with the company even though it has made just one sale for its system of optical memory cards and readers.
Back in 1990, Soltesz was a former restaurant owner who saw a business opportunity in developing a way to prevent credit card theft.
Soltesz, a Niles native with degrees in business and art from Dennison University, settled on optical memory cards, which can store the equivalent of 2,000 pages of information. His young company developed patents for storing and encrypting data on the cards.
The company's focus shifted from credit cards to developing cards that would replace paper coupons used by those on public assistance.
When that project failed to stir interest despite a pilot program in Delaware, the company tried to persuade the health-care industry to accept the cards. Its idea of having people carry a card with all their health information, including X-rays and magnetic resonance imaging reports, failed to catch on.
As the government began using the optical memory cards for foreigners, however, the company changed its focus to improving the design for terminals to read the cards.
Tenacious battle
Soltesz said he definitely has had times of frustration while pushing the technology. He has spent years of revising products, conducting marketing campaigns, visiting trade shows and rubbing elbows with corporate and government officials.
"It takes a lot of tenacity," he said. "There have been a lot of sleepless nights. We just really believed in this technology and never lost sight of our vision."
& lt;a href=mailto:shilling@vindy.com & gt;shilling@vindy.com & lt;/a & gt;