Hypercom Reaches Out For New POS Opportunities

Earlier this month, the POS vendor, based here, revealed that it had signed an agreement to supply the Georgia Health Partnership with a terminal-based solution that will enable state employees and Medicaid recipients to access their profile information over the Internet.

Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a Dallas-based solution provider with annual revenue of approximately $3 billion, is providing integration services under the contract.

But health care isn't the only new area that Hypercom hopes to tap in months to come, said O.B. Rawls, president of Hypercom North America.

This summer, the vendor plans to set up shop in Tyson's Corner, Va., with an eye toward drumming up government business tied to creating secure systems for the travel industry. There's a natural synergy between the established network of electronic credit and debit systems that has been set up across the United States and the sort of secure systems needed by the travel industry and certain government agencies, Rawls said.

"You trust the system.

It works, it's intuitive, it's inherent in the fiber of our lives," he said. "Why reinvent the wheel?"

That philosophy helped drive the Georgia project, which is entering the pilot phase with several hundred terminals. Because most consumers are familiar with POS terminals, it should be simple to use this technology for other applications that require proof of identity, Rawls said.

The hardware being used is Hypercom's ICE 7000CE touch-screen terminal, which includes a 6-inch VGA touch screen, pen input support, firewall

features and up to 32 Mbytes of Flash ROM and RAM. The device runs on a 32-bit, 128MHz Hitachi chip.

Users of the system in Georgia will be issued plastic ID cards that can be swiped through a terminal, and those terminals will be placed in state facilities and various health-care provider offices. The system can be used to view eligibility for certain benefits, to determine co-payment requirements, to review the status of claims and to locate physicians.

On the flip side, doctors and hospitals will be able to enter claim information electronically and send it to ACS, which is also providing processing services, according to Hypercom.

The system is intended to cut the costs associated with processing health-care claims, said Walt Patterson, vice president of ACS, in a statement. It can take up to 45 days to process paper forms, and that doesn't even account for delays associated with any human data-entry errors, he said.

The first phase of the project, slated for completion next year, will cover Medicaid recipients and uninsured children, Hypercom said. The second phase will add support for state employees, the company said.

Rawls declined to disclose the value of the Georgia contract or pricing for the Hypercom terminal. "We don't give prices, because they depend on

the configuration [of the devices," he said.

Rawls likened the Georgia system to a multimillion-dollar solution that Hypercom built for handling public medical benefits throughout Brazil.

Health care is just one segment that Hypercom believes can benefit from applications built around POS technology.

That's why the company has been busily recruiting VARs and solution providers that can help it move into other arenas. The recruitment effort falls in line with Hypercom's move in January 2000 to do away with a longstanding policy of keeping its development technology in-house, Rawls said.

Hypercom said its partner ranks include more than 100 developers and VARs that work on applications such as ATM deployments and restaurant ordering systems, and everything in-between.

The vendor plans to recruit more allies to work specifically with its new group to help develop solutions for various government security activities, Rawls said.

Hypercom claims a worldwide installed base of more than 5 million terminals. The company recorded a loss of $20 million on revenue of about $292 million for 2001.

More recently, Hypercom reported a loss of $809,000 for first-quarter 2002. This compares with a loss of $13.3 million in the year-earlier period. Revenue for the first quarter of 2002 was $77.1 million, up from $71.1 million a year ago.