The recipient of the Outstanding Individual OSCA award was Dan Cunningham, the co-founder and CEO of Raak Technologies. For more than 20 years, Cunningham has shown leadership, vision, support and commitment to the smart card industry in North America. Dan formerly held the position of president and CEO of Gemplus Card International Corp. and was a founding member and director of the Smart Card Alliance, Smart Card Industry Association (SCIA), the WLAN Smart Card Consortium and the Austin Wireless Alliance Steering Committee. Dans work in these multi-industry bodies and companies helped shape the industry during its formative years and that work continues today. The Outstanding End User Organization award was presented to the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) for creating and implementing the Department of Defense (DoD) Common Access Card (CAC) program. They have issued 5.5 million smart cards since the program’s inception and currently there are over 3 million CACs in circulation. The DMDC team boosted the smart card industry through extensive efforts to communicate with other departments and agencies of the federal government, sharing ideas, lessons learned and solutions. These efforts played an important role in creating a consensus approach that spread to other government smart card ID programs, culminating in an effort to create a common ID card throughout the federal government that became official government policy recently with President Bush’s signing of the recent Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. The Outstanding Supplier Organization award went to Axalto, which has proven its leadership in the smart card industry both through market success and extensive support of the industry. Axalto is a major supplier to the DMDC as well as other federal government and commercial card programs in North America. Axalto executives are at the forefront of smart card advocacy efforts in Washington, D.C., leading or contributing to numerous published reports and actively participating in and sponsoring industry conferences that deal with secure identification technology and applications. Axalto was recently selected as one of the vendors to supply its technology to the Department of State e-passport trials. The award judges consisted of North American industry leaders along with individuals from the analyst and media communities: Phil Becker, Digital ID World; Ernest Berger, Gemplus; Brad Grimes, Washington Technology; John Gould, TowerGroup; Steve Hunt, Forrester; Bryan Ichikawa, Unisys; Klaus Peter Kungl, IBM; Eric Lundquist, eWeek; Zachary Martin, ID Newswire; and Karthik Nagarajan, Frost & Sullivan.
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