The Automated Teller Machine is being geared up to no longer simply deliver cash, but to become a complete sales and service point, and Novadigm Inc has signed agreements with two of the world’s major ATM suppliers to further enable this transition and to open doors for it within the banking and financial world. The Mahwah, New Jersey company has signed strategic partnership deals with both NCR Corp and Diebold Inc, under which it will work with both companies to provide its EDM Enterprise Desktop Manager software distribution and management product to banks and other financial institutions. NCR and Novadigm will implement systems at selected customer sites incorporating NCR’s new personaS family of self-service terminals and Novadigm’s software, which will enable banks and ATM providers to customize products and services on offer through the ATMs. The idea is to be able to offer various bank services, not just cash, through the ATM, and to use the ATM as a sales channel for the bank or financial institution, which can be personalized, and updated as regularly as required. Novadigm’s EDM enables software to be distributed automatically from one central point, and it manages the software once it is out in the field, using intelligent agents that know what hardware and software is available at each user node. Using the company’s patented ‘fractional differencing’ technology – the subject of the company’s lawsuit against Marimba Inc (CI No 3,234) – EDM distributes only those updates required by, in this case, each ATM, and knows exactly what hardware and software is at each site, thereby distributing the right versions of software without any code changes being needed. Banks will therefore be able to update messages, for example mortgage offers, on a daily basis if required, and add new applications to the ATM whenever they wish. The same applies to users of Diebold’s ATM’s. EDM is already being used by Wells Fargo Bank, Bay Bank and Bank of Boston in the US. The NCR and Diebold deals should open doors for Novadigm in major banks and financial institutions throughout the world. The company is especially pleased with the NCR endorsement of its software, since NCR has a major partnership with Computer Associates International Inc to resell CA’s Unicenter TNG management suite, which itself has a software distribution component. Novadigm believes it is the only company that offers the intelligence about different configurations on the network, and the fractional differencing to update only that which is missing, with minimal network traffic overhead. As kiosks become ever more prevalent for retail and banking applications, enabling all sorts of self-service transactions, Novadigm believes EDM will be even more in demand.
