HID Global is a manufacturer of secure identity products and a subsidiary of the Swedish conglomerate Assa Abloy. The company’s mission is to power the trusted identities of people, places, and things, enabling them to transact safely, work productively, and travel freely. HID Global aims to deliver a frictionless user experience for both consumers and enterprise customers by providing secure and adaptive authentication. Its goal is to empower people with convenient access to physical and digital places.
Recognized for quality and innovation, HID Global is considered a trusted leader in products and solutions for creating, managing, and using secure identities. The company serves a wide range of markets, including physical and logical access control, IT security, card personalization, and government ID. HID Global’s solutions are utilized by approximately 90% of Fortune 500 companies, and it has issued over 500 million secure credentials. The company is known for its expertise in identity documents and for providing robust and complete systems.
Offerings, Capabilities, and Integrations
HID Global provides trusted identity and access management solutions that enable people to transact safely, work productively, and travel freely. The company’s offerings encompass physical access control, identity and access management, and secure issuance products. This comprehensive portfolio allows HID Global to serve a wide range of markets, including government, healthcare, education, financial institutions, and industrial businesses. A key competitive advantage for HID Global is its ability to integrate physical and digital security solutions, providing a unified approach to identity management. This is exemplified by its HID Integration Service, a platform designed to streamline the integration of physical security, cybersecurity, and digital identity management. The company’s reputation is built on robust quality, innovative designs, and industry leadership.
Products and Services
HID Global’s product and service portfolio is extensive, covering the full spectrum of secure identity solutions. The company’s offerings can be categorized as follows:
- Access Control: HID Global is a leading manufacturer of physical access control products. This includes a wide variety of readers, such as the iCLASS, Signo, and OMNIKEY lines, as well as controllers, credentials in the form of cards and tags, and mobile access solutions that turn smartphones into secure credentials. The company offers both on-premise and cloud-based physical access control systems.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): The company provides a comprehensive suite of IAM solutions, including multi-factor authentication, digital identity verification, and AI-powered risk management to protect against cyber threats. Its HID Authentication Platform is a key offering, providing a single platform for managing both physical and digital identities.
- Secure Issuance: HID Global offers a range of products for creating and managing secure identity credentials. This includes FARGO card printers and encoders for personalizing ID cards, as well as software for managing the issuance process. The company also provides solutions for financial instant issuance, allowing banks to immediately issue customized payment cards in-branch.
- Biometrics: The company’s portfolio includes advanced biometric authentication technologies, such as fingerprint and facial recognition, to enhance security and user experience.
- RFID and Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS): HID Global is a major provider of RFID technology for various applications, including asset tracking, inventory management, and animal identification. Its RTLS solutions are used for applications like infant security, wander management, and staff duress alerts in healthcare settings.
A notable new product is the OMNIKEY SE Plug, a compact and portable reader that extends secure authentication to a wide range of devices, including laptops, phones, and desktops. The iCLASS and HID Prox card and reader lines are considered among its flagship products, being widely adopted industry standards for physical access control.
Target Customers
HID Global serves a diverse customer base across numerous industries and market segments. The company’s solutions are designed to meet the security and identity management needs of large enterprises, government agencies, healthcare organizations, educational institutions, and financial services companies. End-users of HID products primarily include government, financial, corporate, education, and healthcare markets. For example, approximately 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use HID solutions.
These target customers benefit from HID Global’s products and services in several ways:
- Governments: Benefit from secure credentialing for national IDs and e-passports, as well as robust physical and digital security for government facilities and networks.
- Healthcare: Utilize solutions for safeguarding patients, staff, and visitors through secure access control, real-time location services for asset and people tracking, and secure management of medical records.
- Financial Institutions: Leverage secure identity verification, multi-factor authentication for online banking, and instant issuance of payment cards to enhance security and customer experience.
- Educational Institutions: Implement solutions for securing campuses, managing student and staff access to facilities and resources, and issuing student IDs.
- Commercial Enterprises: Benefit from comprehensive security solutions that protect employees, assets, and data through integrated physical and logical access control, visitor management, and secure credentialing.
Cloud Integrations and Marketplaces
HID Global provides several cloud-based platforms and integrations, primarily centered around its HID Origo, HID Authentication Service, and HID Integration Service platforms. The company has a significant presence on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud infrastructure, but it does not have a listed presence on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
- Microsoft Azure: HID Global has a strong presence within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. It offers multiple solutions on the Azure Marketplace, including the HID Authentication Platform for secure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with Entra ID, and HID PKI-as-a-Service for managing private PKI trust hierarchies. HID also provides the ActivID Credential Management System via the marketplace. A key integration is with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), which allows employees to use their existing physical access cards as an MFA method for logging into digital resources like Microsoft 365. The HID WorkforceID Authentication solution also integrates with both on-premise Active Directory and cloud-based Azure AD.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): HID Global collaborates with AWS to integrate its technologies. Its HID U. ARE. U Camera Identification System and advanced imaging technology work with Amazon Rekognition, an AI-powered computer vision service, for identity verification. Furthermore, HID Global’s Origo cloud platform is built upon AWS services, utilizing its infrastructure to deliver scalable and secure access control solutions.
- Google Cloud: There are no specific products or services from HID Global listed on the Google Cloud Marketplace. While HID has announced the availability of mobile credentials in Google Wallet for employee access, this is a consumer-facing mobile application and not an enterprise integration or listing on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
HID’s core cloud offerings facilitate the integration of physical and digital access control.
- HID Origo: This is a cloud platform designed to unify physical security with building applications and IoT use cases. It provides developers with APIs and SDKs to create connected solutions, embedding cloud functionality into mobile devices, readers, and controllers.
- HID Authentication Service: This is a multi-tenant cloud service for identity and access management that offers scalable, frictionless multi-factor authentication. It is designed to help organizations manage and use identities across various environments.
- HID Integration Service: This cloud-native platform is built to streamline the connection between physical security, identity management, and cybersecurity systems, reducing the complexity of system interoperability.
Key People
- President and CEO: Björn Lidefelt
- Chief Operating Officer & Senior Vice President: Rodney Glass
- Senior Vice President and CTO: Ramesh Songukrishnasamy
- Senior Vice President and Head of Physical Access Control Solutions: Martin Huddart
- Senior Vice President, Head of Secure Issuance and Citizen ID Solutions: Craig Sandness
- Senior Vice President and Head of Identification Technologies: Marc Bielmann
- Senior Vice President and Head of Identity and Access Management Solutions: Martin Ladstaetter
- Senior Vice President and Head of Extended Access Technologies: Steve Currie
- Senior Vice President, Marketing & Communications: Stacey Donahue
- Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Development & Strategy: Tim Moxon
- SVP & Head of Finance: Debbie Fugate
- SVP & Head of Legal: Karen Higgins
Key Facts
- Headquarters: Austin, Texas, United States.
- Number of Employees: Approximately 4,500.
- Annual Revenue: $6.1 billion.
- Parent Company: Assa Abloy AB.
- Subsidiary Companies: HID has acquired over 30 companies, including Fargo Electronics, Integrated Engineering, and LaserCard.
- Publicly Listed: No.
Analyst Recognition
HID Global is recognized by several key analyst groups for its offerings in various technology sectors.
- Gartner positions HID Global as a Leader in its 2024 Magic Quadrant for Indoor Location Services. This recognition is based on Gartner’s evaluation of the company’s completeness of vision and ability to execute.
- IDC has named HID Global a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Access Control as a Service (ACaaS).
- At present, HID Global is not prominently featured as a leader in recent Forrester Wave or Everest Group PEAK Matrix™ reports for its core technology areas.
