Chief Technical Officer Steve Bell – opening doors for 35 years

For over 35 years, Hamilton based Steve Bell has been instrumental in every iteration of the tech behind our world-leading security products – from our very first security readers which opened a door using a mag stripe card (like a credit card) to today where simply holding up your mobile phone can open doors.

Over the years Steve’s held a number of roles; starting as a Software Engineer, moving to become a Project Manager, Software Manager, Development Manager, and Chief Technical Officer.

In conversation, Steve lists an impressive string of milestones which have been pivotal building blocks to the next generation of security solutions we’re launching now. It all started in 1987 where he and a very small team worked on a project for Telecom in New Zealand (now known as Spark) which grew from securing 50 doors to 2000 doors.

“After that, the next significant step would have been launching Cardax FT (our first major foray into the Security market) which included the Controller 5000 and new readers,” Steve explains. “This was a revolutionary development, which started from scratch with a very big vision.”

It took more than three years of development, and a lot of trial and error.

“When we set it up at a test site in Melbourne we went in thinking it should work, but we quickly found that it didn’t work very well. We didn’t give up though and we celebrated every success it had – running reliably for a day, running reliably for a week, then running reliably for a month.”

By 2004, the Security business was really coming along and we cemented our entry into the high security market with certification for Australia, known as Type 1.
“Working with the Australian Government came with fantastic learnings and this was one of the best assets for our future.”

The next milestone was launching the Controller 6000.

“With the Controller 6000 we delivered awesome processing power within an affordable device, all while delivering all sorts of technology firsts. Our learnings from working with the Australian Government also enabled us to create a high security variant of the Controller 6000 which was many steps above what our competitors were offering.”

As time went on security standards strengthened, which led to Steve’s next milestone: being involved in meeting the requirements for the US Government.

“I attended a trade show in the United States, and we learnt a lot about the standards – called FIPS201-2 & PIV – and general state of play in the market.”
Steve and the project team found our platform was a perfect candidate to add PIV technology to, which uses the most secure certificate and cryptography technology. This resulted in the delivery of the highest performing solution on the US Government’s approved security product list.

He cites the next building block – our Type 1A certification for Australia – as something only made possible because of our private ownership.

“Getting into Type 1A involved building an entirely new system which spanned both software and hardware. It was an enormous project and I think the fact that we are family owned enabled this to happen, as it seems very unlikely that a public company could be patient enough to spend significant amounts of money on its development without immediate returns.”

Before handing the reins to our current Chief Product Officer, Meredith Palmer, Steve kicked off our entry into the cloud with Gallagher Mobile Connect, which enables customers to use their mobile device as an access card.

All these milestones are the building blocks to several of our new products now on the market including SMB, the Controller 7000, Command Centre Web, and of course our continued focus of leading in the high security market. None of this would have been possible without the work done over the past three decades.

“Technology and the big stuff that can be achieved by it, and working with incredibly talented people are two key things that get me out of bed in the morning. I celebrate each time we have a successful implementation of a new technology, something we have not done before, something we have worked very hard to achieve, and especially where we have beaten our worldwide industry peers.”