UNFAZED BY THE slow commercial adoption of smart cards, makers of the authentication technology are stepping up efforts to deliver development tools and improved ease-of-use features to assuage users' skepticism and help convince smart-card manufacturers to lower their prices.

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Visa, MasterCard, and American Express regularly snare headlines in their attempts to capture and translate the success of smart cards in Europe as multipurpose identification and personal monetary devices for introduction to the North American audience. The task has not gone all that smoothly, however, due to cultural, privacy, and practicality barriers.

But even as credit card companies encounter resistance selling the payment functions of smart cards to retailers, consumers, and financial institutions, the technology has gained appeal as a mechanism for vendors to combine security and stored-value functions into products before they're shipped, says Phil Shacter, an analyst at The Burton Group, a Midvale, Utah-based market research company.

"Smart cards themselves have not been a huge success as a network-authentication technology, mostly because they have a hardware requirement that a lot of machines did not come off the shelf with built-in," Shacter says. "I think we're beginning to see some movement in the use of this technology as a multifunction security token to be used in [terminal] site access and management of that access."

Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Gemplus, its smartX software-focused spin-off ThinkPulse, Vasco Data Security, and biometric-oriented vendor KeyWare all introduced products this month to jump-start use of the card technology.

Shacter says Gemplus' announcement of its GemSafe Thin Client for Citrix MetaFrame software in particular is significant because it "plugs a hole" in Microsoft Windows' smart-card strategy by allowing Citrix MetaFrame users to log in from random locations. Although Microsoft 2000 can support smart-card applications, the thin-client capability has not yet been developed for the popular desktop program.

GemSafe Thin Client uses PKI (public key infrastructure) to offer secure and nonrepudiated authentication for business operations, including Web and e-mail access, digital identity, physical security, and stored-value applications.

ThinkPulse, based in San Jose, Calif., and KeyWare, in Woburn, Mass., released the smartX Automation Toolkit (ATK) and Layered Biometric Verification (LBV) Smart Card Toolkit, respectively, this month to give users better hands-on management and customization of smart-card technology.

ATK simplifies smart-card deployment by enabling developers to use XML to create Application Directories of smart-card applications. Applications can be written to recognize multiple smart cards on one terminal, according to ThinkPulse officials.

Via KeyWare's LBV Server, the LBV Smart Card Toolkit can be used to apply biometric authentication and protection to smart cards, according to a Keyware representative. An organization can determine what level or type of biodata authentication the smart card will require, such as voice, iris, fingerprint, and/or face, or any combination of those.

Some smart-card vendors, such as Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based Vasco, have narrowed their focus to combining multiple network-access functions with transaction-processing capabilities.

Last week, the company released DigiPass 800, a portable smart-card reader that when presented with a PIN number from a user's existing smart card "regardless of its preprogrammed function" can operate from any platform without the need for any other smart-card reader or client software, according to Jan Valcke, vice president and general manager at Vasco.

"It eliminates the need to provide users with both a personalized smart card and a separately personalized authentication device," Valcke says.

Until the infrastructure to support daily use and practices of smart cards is accessible and firmly in place in greater numbers, aggressive efforts by vendors to promote their technology will be stalled, according to Steve Hunt, vice president of research at Giga Information Group, in Chicago.

"Smart-card technology is already in place. It's been there for some time. We're just waiting for the rest of the infrastructure to catch up," Hunt says.

Hunt predicted that it would be at least another two or three years before smart cards make the transition from a traditional network-access device to a multifunction storage, purchasing, and personal-information card.

"It's a matter of third-party [smart-card] manufacturers bidding their prices down," Hunt says.