Bantry Technologies - Java Card™

Technologies > Java Card™

Java Card™ is the open operating systems leading technology. By mid-2004, it owns 96% of the overall market. In 2003, an estimated 220 million Java Card were shipped and Frost and Sullivan expect this figure to increase to 867 million units by 2008. The SIM card market is from far the success driver for Java Card™ and this situation should not change in the future. Enterprise ID is now considered to be the number two market for Java Card™ as interoperability will be a key factor to simplify the integration with the network. The main advantages of Java Card™ are as follows:

Interoperability: The main difficulty for smart card-based service deployments – besides post issuance management - used to be the lack of interoperability among the different card manufacturers’ products. Initially each card vendor had a proprietary language for programming the smart cards. This could be explained by a lack of standardisation. This situation was not acceptable over the long-term and that is why the definition of an interoperable card operating system was promoted by Sun and SchlumbergerSema and later endorsed by all the major card vendors under the umbrella of the Java Card Forum (Java Card™ environment and API) and the ETSI and the related working groups (SIM API for Java Card™).

Interoperability was not however achieved in one day. It took time and energy from all members of the industry to reach this objective. Founded by the major SIM cards manufacturers, the SIMalliance « Java Interoperability Workgroup » considers interoperability in Java Card™ SIM technology to be one of the main challenges for the successful deployment of smart card-based value added services. MaXim respects interoperability issues in full and does not accept any compromise on this side. We consider that a product that would be 99% interoperable is still not interoperable and consequently cannot offer what the industry is looking for.

Post-issuance management: The issue of file and applet management post card personalisation has always been a real issue. In the wireless world, this becomes even more complex since the card can be physically anywhere in any brand of handset. Before the advent of Java, it was virtually impossible to offer a real service enabling to load or remove an applet in a smart card in the hands of an end-user. Every card manufacturer used to have proprietary languages and over-the-air servers, for the wireless community, were quite limited in terms of functionalities. Card issuers, such as telecom operators, were limited to simple operations such as changing date in a given file on a limited number of cards. ETSI has done a great work in specifying over-the-air management of Java SIM cards. It is now feasible to control any card from any supplier as long as it respects the standards. MaXim obviously implements the most comprehensive set of functionalities in this area and enable telecom operators to have a functional card for this type of operations.

Openness to third parties VAS: While native cards only allowed card manufacturers’ developers to offer value added services on their cards, Java has introduced simplicity of programming, which is of great value. Mastered by almost every developer, Java withdraws the limit of a worrying access to the technology. This open standard offers the means to every third party to implement their ideas on any Java card and consequently give the industry a virtually unlimited number of applications to offer the end-customers. The main benefit of this for the whole industry is to open the door to a long-term smart card based strategy. For example, MaXim is fully compliant with the SIM Toolkit standards and we also provide professional interoperable development kits, test kits, card simulators and loading tools to allow developers to focus on the services rather than the technology.

Conclusions: It is clear that Java Card™ is the future for many high-end markets such as the telecom or banking markets, and we firmly believe that this acceptance can be really beneficial by offering the market more flexibility, more control, full respect to the standard, short time-to-market in any circumstances and much better pricing. With this in mind, Bantry Technologies worked on a modern approach to now deliver Java Card™ SIM and related value added services for the telecom market segment, including the MaXim product for the telecommunication world. This solution is in line with a business chain, which is constantly evolving.